Today Dell EMC announced that its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio will now be powered by its newly designed Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers. Adding PowerEdge 14G servers will bring better and more predictable performance and they are designed and optimized for HCI. This will be especially beneficial and add new features to users of software applications on Dell EMC VxRail and XC Series appliances.





Today Dell EMC announced that its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio will now be powered by its newly designed Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers. Adding PowerEdge 14G servers will bring better and more predictable performance and they are designed and optimized for HCI. This will be especially beneficial and add new features to users of software applications on Dell EMC VxRail and XC Series appliances.

HCI has really taken off over the last year or so. According to IDC, HCI is the fasted growing converged infrastructure segment, by far, with worldwide revenue growing 48.5% year over year in Q2 of 2017, now accounting for nearly 25% of overall converged infrastructure solutions sold. Of all the HCI systems being sold, Dell EMC makes 29% of the same quarter listed above, meaning that they are selling more than any other single vendor. The company has seen their revenue grow as much as 149% year over year and have seen a customers adoption rate over 275% for its Dell EMC VxRail, over 5 times the entire market growth rate.

Dell EMC is looking to blow past these numbers by adding all the benefits of its newly released PowerEdge 14G server line as the foundation of its HCI portfolio. Adding the server line will bring about greater performance and scalability and with the ability to customize the servers, customers will have new levels of flexibility and agility. This could potentially expand use cases for HCI in the data center for certain customers. Having software-defined storage (SDS) built-in, the new PowerEdge servers are ideal for HCI. Also beneficial to HCI is the servers improved support for SSDs in scale-out deployments; faster initialization and streamlined data storage management; increased drive cooling for improved reliability; and, optional, common user interfaces across server and HCI platforms for Dell EMC systems management capabilities.

Dell EMC currently has three main HCI product families, the VxRail, VxRack, and the XC series. The VxRail appliance family is jointly engineered by Dell EMC and VMware and is powered by VMware vSAN. With the addition of PowerEdge 14G servers, Dell EMC states that customer can see more powerful and predictable performance across millions of flexible configuration options to meet any HCI use case and more demanding, mission-critical workloads in VMware environments.

VxRail Appliance customers can expect:

Better performance for the most demanding applications with up to 2X more IOPS (input/output operations per second), and more than 2x faster response times

Highly dependable performance with 9x more predictable response times sustained at sub-one millisecond

More options for perfectly right-sized deployments with millions more configurations including more processor options, new SATA SSDs, additional network connectivity options, and more GPU expansion to precisely match customers’ HCI requirements without over provisioning

Software-defined NAS support with Dell EMC Isilon SD Edge for remote office or edge-to-core file deployments, joining VxRail’s remote replication, cloud object storage and manageability capabilities

The Dell EMC XC appliance series are for customers that what choice in the hypervisor, such as Microsoft Hyper-V. With the addition of the 14G PowerEdge servers, the company states that customers can see higher performance for workloads, faster networking speeds and new NVMe/SSD configurations.

Dell EMC XC Series appliances, customers can expect:

Increased performance for compute intensive workloads with up to 50% additional cores per appliance

Up to 93% increased compute capability for workloads with storage density as a primary need

Expanded use cases in VDI environments for sophisticated compute needs with 50% more GPU power

Availability

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances on Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers can be ordered and are expected to be generally available starting December 12, 2017. Dell EMC XC Series models XC640, XC740xd and XC740 on Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers are generally available now.

Dell EMC HCI

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