The following Q&A was compiled from “Ask the Expert: Let’s talk VSPEX BLUE (Chinese Version)”.

Question 1: I occasionally read the word “Mystic” in the document, what’s the “Mystic”?

Answer:

Mystic was the code name for VSPEX Blue, the solution is based off of VMware’s EVO:Railplatform and leverages EMC whitebox nodes that are the same being used in our Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) box. It called VSPEX Blue.

Question 2: There is a Flash acceleration layer in VMware VSAN, is there the same Flash layer in VSPEX Blue? How to achieve it?

Answer: EMC VSPEX BLUE solution/product delivers compute, storage, networking and management powered by VMware EVO: RAIL and EMC software. VSAN is the key component of VMware EVO: RAIL. In version 1.0 of VSAN, Flash acceleration layer is required component, not optional component. In general, VMware recommends that SSD disk volume is 10% of all HDD disk volume in single disk group. It can be used for Read/Write cache to improve the VSAN performance.  

Question 3: EMC VSPEX Blue delivers Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, why is it called Hyper-Converged Infrastructure? What is Converged Infrastructure?

Answer: Cisco and EMC, together with VMware established the VCE coalition in 2009, spearheading the movement toward converged infrastructure. VCE delivered the vBlockswhich converge Cisco UCS compute and Nexus networking, EMC storage and VMware virtualization, it helps to create a new market category now known as converged infrastructure. The components of vBlcokcome from the different IT company, but customer can enjoy one-stop service from VCE.

For more information about vBlock systems, I recommend you refer to the home products of VCE. 

Question 4: I notice there are two modes of VSPEX, what’s different between VSPEX Blue and VSPEX?

Answer:

According to the converged infrastructure definition from EMC, VSPEX is reference architecture production solution,VSPEX Blue is Hyper-Converged appliance.

EMC CI system includes the following category:

1.     Reference architecture, representative product is VSPEX.

2.     Engineered system, representative product is vBlock.

3.     Hyper-converged appliance, representative product is VSPEX Blue.

Engineered system is similar to all-in-one machine (include integrated system and infrastructure system). Reference architecture and engineered system are the system included server, storage and network. Hyper-converged appliance converge computer, networking, storage and virtualization.

                                                                                                                                             

Translator: Jeffey