Storage vendor EMC and virtualiser VMware have jointly launched a family of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments. The plug and play gadgets are meant to simplify infrastructure management in departments experiencing high growth.
The VxRail appliance family combines EMC’s data services and systems management with VMware’s software such as vSphere and Virtual SAN. The intention is to create software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere in a single product family with one point of support. The all-flash VxRail appliances could simplify VMware customer environments and boost performance and capacity in a simple plug and play operation, the vendors claim.
The appliances were jointly engineered to integrate virtualisation, computing, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support, say the vendors. Since they can be aggregated at great scale, the estate of appliances can grow from supporting two virtual machines (VMs) to thousands of VMs on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ basis.
Starting prices for small and medium businesses and remote offices are around $60,000, with options for performance intensive workloads to be catered for with up to have 76 TB of flash. The appliances will run EMC’s data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. In addition RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Virtual SAN, vSphere Data Protection and EMC Data Domain are all available.
Meanwhile VCE VxRail Manager will provide hardware awareness with timely notifications about the state of applications, VMs and events. VxRail Appliances can use EMC cloud tiering to extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream. These can provide an additional 10TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance.
“The new appliances put IT organisations on a path to eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures,” said Chad Sakac, President of the Converged Platforms division of EMC.
According to ESG research on hybrid cloud 70% of IT respondents plan to invest in HCI in the next 24 months. The new appliance family is due out n Q2 2016.