VCE, the converged infrastructure division of EMC, has fired a warning shot at hyperconverged darlings Nutanix and Simplivity with the launch of its own appliance, the VxRail.
VxRail starts at a list price of $60,000. An entry-level appliance would boast hybrid storage, six cores, 64GB of memory and 3.6TB storage. A top-spec, all-flash node could run up to 28 cores, 512GB memory and 19TB storage.
Matthew Oostveen, chief technology officer at VCE Asia-Pacific & Japan, agreed that the VxRail pricing was set to compete against the likes of Nutanix and Simplivity, but stressed that VCE's greatest focus was not displacing early adopters of hyperconverged appliances but greenfield opportunities.
He estimated the converged market – where VCE's flagship Vblock plays – is worth $5-7 billion, while the nascent hyperconverged market is only around $300 million.
He pointed to a few reasons why the VxRail product could have an edge over rivals: EMC's huge global sales force; the combined partner channel of EMC and VMware, which will all get access to the appliance; and VMware's incumbency in the data centre.
"The reality is this is a new market and there are established players. In order for us to be competitive, we had to work hard on this engineering. We had to make sure the integration between VMware and VCE was tight. We had to make sure this is not just some 'software installed on some hardware', it is genuine appliance. We had to ensure the pricing was [competitive]," said Oostveen.
VxRail's building block approach means more appliances can be rapidly added to provide more capacity. "Organisations can start small, with a couple of virtual machines (VMs), and easily and non-disruptively scale to thousands of VMs with a predictable, 'pay-as-you-grow' approach," according to VCE.
A single box can host up to 200 virtual machines, and by expanding the environment up to a maximum of 16 appliances, users can run 1,280 cores and 384TB of storage, driving up to 3,200 VMs. Oostveen pointed out that at this scale, a VxRail, VxBlock or Vblock may be a better fit.
Speed of deployment is one promise, according to VCE, with 15 minutes between "power on" and provisioning virtual machines, then just five minutes to add a new appliance, which can be configured automatically.
Three layers of VMware software are running on the x86 server hardware – vCenter Server for management, vSphere Enterprise Plus hypervisor and VSAN software-defined storage.
Target customers
High-end Vblocks are known for their equally high price tags, and tend to be found at the heart of enterprise data centres. VCE expects the VxRail to open up new opportunities in the commercial channel, such as at the edge of distributed enterprises like branch offices of a bank or retail outlets of a supermarket chain.
VDI scenarios would be another use case, with one appliance able to operate up to 600 virtual desktops.
Aaron Steppat, senior product marketing manager at VMware ANZ, expected VxRail to have an edge over rival hyperconverged platforms thanks to VMware's incumbency in corporate IT, where sysadmins are already well-versed in vSphere.
He called it "the path of least resistance", adding that the use of well-known VMware tools made VxRail "radically simple storage".
"There are a lot of organisations out there that have invested heavily in VMware expertise and VMware education. So the last thing we want to do is have them retool just to take advantage of this new wave, of consuming these building blocks," said Steppat.
One early users was Fujifilm Medical Systems in the USA. Fred Sinclair, the company's product manager, technology solutions, said: “With the tightness of the VMware and EMC integration, everything worked like clockwork. The simplicity of deploying and managing the VxRail appliance enables us to free up our engineers to do what they do best – help our customers deploy IT and imaging solutions that impact patient care."
VxRail joins VCE's family of converged systems that started in 2009 with the flagship Vblock, and has since been expanded with the addition of the VxBlock and VxRack.
The products serve different market tiers and house different components.
The Vblock combines technology from VCE's founding partners, with a VMware hypervisor, Cisco USC for compute, Cisco networking and EMC storage.
The newer additions, VxBlock and VxRack, include VMware's NSX software-defined networking. VxBlock runs NSX on top of Cisco hardware, with Cisco UCS providing the compute. VxRack runs NSX on a Cisco networking hardware, but uses commodity x86 servers built by Quanta, as does VxRail.
SDN is central to the dysfunction that undermined the VCE partnership. VMware's 2012 acquisition of Nicira, which became the foundation for its NSX technology, put it into competition with Cisco, which has its own take on SDN, which it calls Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI.
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