Dell EMC Expands Hyper-Converged Infrastructure for Indian Market

Dell EMC has expanded its leading converged systems portfolio by integrating its Dell EMC PowerEdge servers into Dell EMC VxRail Appliances hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) in India.

VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge servers allow Dell EMC to address more use cases in India and to help modernize data centers with comprehensive service and support that provide a path to assisting business growth and investment protection for organizations of all sizes.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is rapidly becoming the new normal for modern data centers. While, hyper-converged infrastructure is being marginally preferred for perimeter workloads, which are non-core for the business. It is also being used extensively where organizations have high scale-out requirements. With scalability and simplicity as the key parameters for customers in India, HCI appliances are a perfect fit for businesses looking to move from a “build yourself” to a “buy” model.

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, powered by PowerEdge servers, will be made available in India, starting this month, with the expanded portfolio to be available more broadly across the Asia-Pacific region this October.

“Modernizing IT infrastructure and reducing infrastructure footprint are the key IT priorities across organizations.” said Matt Oostveen, Chief Technology Officer, Dell EMC Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, Asia Pacific & Japan.  “Technologies such as hyper-converged infrastructure are gaining traction to address both optimization demands and removing infrastructure management complexities. HCI is the fastest-growing part of the IT infrastructure market as businesses of all sizes continue to desire substantial infrastructure simplification,”

“Dell EMC’s vision is to look holistically at the customers, by not just solving their infrastructure challenges, but help them towards meeting their business objectives and keeping this in mind, we are committed to addressing the growing needs of the converged systems market in India said Anshuman Rai, Director Sales– Converged Platform & Solutions Division (CPSD). Hyper-converged infrastructure has quickly proven effective for core data center workloads. We are now extending the long awaited availability of VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge servers here in India, enabling organizations to benefit from greater HCI performance with even more flexibility and scalability.”

“This unique architecture is the result of our joint vision with Dell EMC to consistently deliver to our customers a simple, cost effective hyper-converged solution for a wide variety of applications and workloads,” said B.S. Nagarajan, Senior Director, Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, VMware India. “VxRail will provide customers with the seamless and familiar VMware experience for quick and easy deployment while protecting their investment in existing infrastructure and expertise. This means businesses can devote their IT resources to finding the best and most innovative uses of technology rather than constantly making decisions about what technology is required” he added.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Gains Momentum

According to the latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker¹, the worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 4.6% year over year to $2.67 billion during the first quarter of 2017. Hyper-converged systems continued to be the fastest growing segment by far, growing 64.7% year over year globally. Dell EMC continues to be the undisputed leader in the overall converged systems market with 28.9% market share and is the fastest growing HCI vendor, more than doubling sales year-over-year for Q1 2017, according to the analyst firm.

IDC research also shows that, for the Asia-Pacific & Japan (APJ) region, the hyper-converged infrastructure segment grew 111% year over year for the first quarter of 2017, more than doubling revenue from the same period a year ago. Also during the first quarter of 2017, IDC data notes that Dell EMC’s HCI sales grew by 325% in APJ, three times faster than the market.

Customers Gain More from Expanded Dell EMC Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Portfolio

The Dell EMC VxRail Appliance family of fully integrated, preconfigured and pre-tested HCI appliances offers the industry’s only HCI appliances powered by VMware vSAN™ and jointly engineered with VMware. Since the global launch in March 2016, Dell EMC has sold more than 14,000 VxRail nodes—exceeding 145 petabytes of storage and 150,000 cores—to more than 2,000 customers in dozens of industries across 97 countries.

VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge servers expands the VxRail Appliances portfolio to address new use cases. These VxRail Appliances feature 40% more CPU performance for the same price, increased flexibility and scalability with more configurations, all-flash nodes equipped with double the storage capacity and a new 3-node entry point that is more than 25% less expensive. New addressable workloads include:

• Storage heavy workloads including Big Data Analytics and Microsoft Exchange can take advantage of VxRail Appliances based on the PowerEdge R730xd platform that has highly dense storage nodes coupled with the latest Intel processors to provide high-performance processing.
• Graphics-heavy client virtualization workloads that require increasing levels of performance found in the latest operating systems including Microsoft Windows 10, as well as productivity applications and graphics-intensive CAD/CAM, research and development applications based on the PowerEdge R730.
• Remote Office/Branch Office environments can leverage the low-end 3-node entry option based on the PowerEdge R630 with a starting priced as low as US $25,000 for a three-node cluster², allowing customers to cost-effectively deploy HCI to simplify IT management at multiple remote sites.

Additionally, the launch of Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5 delivers several new enterprise features:

• Enhanced enterprise deployment features –The VxRail Appliance deployment experience, which is optimized to deploy a single appliance in only 20 minutes³, now can be applied to larger cluster sizes, allowing customers to add and manage 10 or more appliances as easily as a single appliance.
• Additional hardware flexibility lowers total cost of ownership – New single processor options, reduce the cost of deploying processor-based licensed software for scaling up to 64 nodes. New network options, including up to 12 additional ports, allow VxRail Appliances to be deployed in environments requiring physical network segmentation of workloads.
• Support for the latest VMware technologies – New VMware vSphere 6.5 and VMware vSAN 6.6 support adds optimized data service algorithms to accelerate flash performance, software-defined data-at-rest encryption to protect against unwanted access to data, and enhanced protection for stretched clusters.
• Improved interoperability with Dell EMC technologies – Customers deploying VxRail Appliances now can leverage a centralized Dell EMC Secure Remote Services (ESRS) gateway to provide a single point of secure, two-way remote support for their entire Dell EMC infrastructure.