EMC and VMware have announced a line of integrated and jointly engineered “hyper-converged” infrastructure appliances (HCIAs) for VMware environments. The new VCE VxRail Appliance family brings together EMC data services and systems management capabilities with VMware’s software that includes VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware Virtual SAN, the software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere. Hybrid storage or all-flash VxRail Appliances help simplify VMware customer environments and deliver performance and capacity advantages in a single HCIA.
“The new VCE VxRail Appliance family puts IT organizations on a path to eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures with hyper-converged infrastructure while leveraging their existing VMware investments,” said Chad Sakac, president of VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC. “The VxRail Appliance completes our broad portfolio of Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems to provide customers with a converged infrastructure that meets nearly every workload from the edge to the core regardless of size."
The jointly engineered VCE VxRail Appliances tightly integrate virtualization, compute, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support. Organizations can start small, with a couple of virtual machines (VMs), and scale to thousands of VMs with a pay-as-you-grow approach, EMC and VMware said. Entry systems for small and medium businesses and remote offices start at a list price of $60,000 and options for performance intensive workloads have more than 76TB of flash.
VxRail Appliances include integrated EMC data services such as replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines provides per-VM replication and automated disaster recovery for critical workloads. Virtual SAN active-active stretch clusters provide site level, zero data loss protection. Integrated vSphere Data Protection provides backup and recovery using existing tools and can optionally backup to EMC Data Domain for centralized storage and management.
VxRail Appliances also leverage EMC cloud tiering to extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and very shortly Virtustream, providing an additional 10TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance.
For more information, go to the EMC website at www.emc.com.