The Next Act for HCI

The best show in town only gets better with age.

Whether implementing your cloud solutions, modernizing your data center or expanding operations at the edge, VxRail transforms your business environment into a single, consistent and automated infrastructure ecosystem.

The curtains opened to reveal IT teams struggling with complex lifecycle management, disparate platforms across their infrastructure and siloed experts training themselves into specialty corners with skills that would soon become obsolete. Weekends lost to unplanned outages, frustrating calls with multiple vendors and innovation blocked by constant issue remediation was the norm. A way out just did not seem possible at times.

IT teams knew what they needed. They needed an infrastructure that would work seamlessly, taking the pain and research out of clunky upgrade processes that spanned across storage, compute, networking and virtualization. They wished for a single vendor to engineer, automate and support their infrastructure as a single system and give them the freedom to scale with their business.

Dell answered with VxRail – and IT became the heroes as they deployed hyperconverged solutions that combined their infrastructure into a single software defined solution

The montage of business benefits was immediate

Staff was freed to do simple things like go to lunch or enjoy events on the weekend, and just as importantly, they were freed to innovate, providing more value to the business. Unplanned downtime dropped by 92%¹ with VxRail engineered systems, pre-validated updates and single call support. VMs were deployed faster and payback was realized in as little as 10 months¹ as teams became more efficient and lowered operating costs.¹ VxRail simplified operations, automated lifecycle management and extended the native capabilities of VMware. VxRail HCI System Software delivered intelligent automation, enabling customers to quickly adopt updates across all VxRail clusters, saving time, reducing effort and preventing outdated software from becoming a target for hackers.

Staying ahead of the changing script

As the explosion of technology continues to create more insight, faster business decisions and differentiation, it is also driving complexity and sprawl. Finding the right cloud profile for the business becomes more daunting as you look to enable cloud native developers, IT and consumers side by side. At the edge, there are more sensors to monitor, more robots to manage and multiple programming languages and data formats to aggregate. In the data center, the push towards efficiency has never been stronger with more remote workforce requirements and demands for mission critical applications drawing on resources.

Business is bringing IT efficiency to their entire infrastructure by simplifying their landscape with purpose-built VxRail platforms. They are extending the modernization benefits of a single operating model, automated lifecycle management and more beyond their data center to their entire business. Where customers once de-siloed their storage, compute and network teams, they are now finding those same efficiencies across their landscape, putting the teams and technology managing public cloud, hyperscalers, multi-cloud, Operational Teams (OT) and data centers on the same page.

    • We are seeing teams embrace hybrid and multi-cloud environments, tailored to their needs through consumption-based APEX offerings powered by VxRail, using VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, or developing cloud native applications on VxRail DevOps-ready platforms that are validated with all the major Kubernetes orchestration platforms.
    • In the datacenter, customers count on the flexible VxRail architecture to run enterprise workloads on the same clusters as remote workforce and general-purpose applications. With VxRail dynamic nodes, they can flexibly scale compute and storage as needed or utilize PowerStore, PowerMax or Unity arrays as primary storage to make sure the best outcomes are achieved under a consistent operating model, no matter the requirements.
    • Across retail, manufacturing, healthcare and more, industries are simplifying edge strategies by operating those environments the same way they manage their core data centers. VxRail makes that easier by automating lifecycle management, reducing silos and standardizing on a common platform at edge locations. Those platforms start as small as a single node, scalable 2 and 3 node clusters, and offer edge specific validated designs.

IT is not a one-man show

Dynamic environments require a complete cast working together to innovate, finding new ways to provide value to their business. Partnering internally and externally, Dell is committed to making new HCI technology easier, faster and more efficient to integrate. A few of the most recent VxRail advancements include the ability to:

    • Implement, scale and manage AI Infrastructure with the new certification of VMware Cloud Foundation, VxRail and NVIDIA AI Enterprise.
    • Deploy cloud-native storage directly from vCenter and take advantage of almost unlimited enterprise class storage in your Kubernetes environments with Objectscale integration.
    • Simplify and optimize multi-cloud deployment with DevOps-ready platforms running container orchestration solutions delivering intelligent, automated, on-premises infrastructure that accelerates your ability to rapidly provision resources and provide infrastructure-as-code to developers.

In business, there is no curtain call – the show just goes on. IT teams know this and keep exploring the possibilities, driving innovation, partnerships and simplicity for themselves and the vendors they work with. Their extreme pressure testing of VxRail over the last six years has led to the development of a mature, automated and flexible environment designed to thrive when exposed to the rigors of modern IT. As the story  continues to be written, we are working with our partners to make it easier to implement new technology more easily, a great example is the work we are doing with VMware and NVIDIA on Project Monterrey to create next-generation HCI infrastructure.

Whether implementing your cloud solutions, modernizing your data center or expanding operations at the edge, VxRail transforms your IT environment into a single, consistent and automated infrastructure ecosystem.

¹ Based on the IDC Business Value White Paper sponsored by Dell EMC, “The Business Value of Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail, December 2020.” Actual results may vary.

About the Author: Nancy Hurley

Nancy Hurley, is a highly accomplished marketing executive with over 25 years’ experience in strategic planning and implementation, product marketing, product management, messaging and branding and go to market execution. Nancy's team supports the Dell Technologies HCI portfolio, Connectivity solutions, DevOps enablement offerings and the new APEX Cloud Platform portfolio.