EMC and VMWare launch hyper-converged infrastructure appliance

EMC and VMWare have banded together to launch the new VCE VxRail Appliance family, an integrated and jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) for VMware environments.

According to a joint statement, the VxRail Appliance family brings together the best of EMC and VMware including EMC rich data services and leading systems management capabilities with VMware's hyper-converged software.

"IT organisations tasked with supporting growing business demands for new applications and services with limited budgets and resources don't want to waste time constantly evaluating and integrating hardware, software, and networking solutions, nor do they have time to learn new operational tools and processes," EMC says.

"The new hyper-converged VCE VxRail Appliances extend the hallmark benefits of VCE converged infrastructure - increased agility, simplified operations and lower risk – to small businesses, medium-sized enterprises, and department or regional offices for virtualisation and end-user computing use cases.

"The new VCE VxRail Appliance family puts IT organisations on a path to eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures with hyper-converged infrastructure while leveraging their existing VMware investments," explains Chad Sakac, president, 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," he says.

According to Colm Keegan, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, research on hybrid cloud trends reveals 70% of IT respondents plan to invest in HCI over the next 24 months.

Moreover, 85% of these same respondents indicated that they plan on leveraging their existing investments in private cloud software, like VMware vCenter Server and vCloud Director framework technology, to serve as the foundation for their hybrid cloud environment.

"As such, the new VMware and VCE VxRail Appliance could make for a very compelling offering to for those looking to implement a highly flexible and highly scalable hyper-converged infrastructure appliance, with private and hybrid cloud computing capabilities, while still leveraging the same VMware management tools that they have been using for years," Keegan explains.

Yanbing Li, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware, adds, "With the new VCE VxRail Appliances, powered by VMware hyper-converged software, IT organisations are empowered with a solution that is easy to use and can help them drive innovation as rapid as the business demands.

"Together, EMC and VMware have worked closely to enable our mutual customers to realise the value of a tightly integrated, hyper-converged solution," Li says.