EMC and VMware Release a New HyperConverged VCE VXRAIL Appliance Family

EMC and VMware have announced the new VCE VxRail Appliance family offering integrated and jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments. 

The VxRail Appliance family offers EMC data services and systems management capabilities with VMware’s hyper-converged software that includes VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware Virtual SAN – a software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere. 

Hybrid storage or all-flash VxRail Appliances extend VMware environments and deliver performance and capacity advantages in a scalable HCIA. The new hyper-converged VCE VxRail Appliances extend benefits of VCE converged infrastructure, including increased agility, simplified operations and lower risk. The jointly engineered VCE VxRail Appliances integrate virtualization, compute, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support. 

Organizations can start small, with a couple of virtual machines (VMs), scale to thousands of VMs with a “pay-as-you-grow” approach. VxRail Appliances are available in a broad set of configurations and scale points. Entry systems for small and medium businesses and remote offices start at a list price of $60,000 and options for performance intensive workloads have more than 76 TB of flash.   

VxRail Appliances offer integrated EMC data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines provides per-VM replication and automated disaster recovery for critical workloads. Virtual SAN active-active stretch clusters provide site level, zero data loss protection. Integrated vSphere Data Protection provides backup and recovery using existing tools and can optionally backup to EMC Data Domain for centralized storage and management. 

VCE VxRail Manager provides hardware awareness with up-to-the-minute holistic notifications about the state of applications, VMs, and appliance leveraging VMware Log Insight capturing events. VxRail Appliances leverage EMC cloud tiering to extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, AWS, Microsoft Azure and soon Virtustream, to more expand storage capacity, providing an additional 10TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance. 

The EMC and VMware solution helps simplify the infrastructure lifecycle by eliminating constant evaluation cycles and testing with continuous integration of advancements in x86 technologies and implementation of the latest enhancements to VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN delivering efficiency with data reduction technologies - deduplication, compression and erasure coding.

VxRail Appliances also integrate with the broader VMware vSphere ecosystem, supporting existing management, automation, monitoring, and availability tools from VMware. Additionally VxRail Appliances integrate with VMware’s cloud management platform and end-user computing solutions, including VMware vRealize Operations and VMware Horizon Air.