EVO:RAIL is dead long live VxRail

On paper EVO:RAIL was a great idea – VMware provides the Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) software (vSphere and Virtual SAN) and the major server and storage vendors provide the hardware, but one of the biggest problems was that it was 100% designed by VMware therefore how could the likes of EMC, NetApp, Dell, HP, HDS, etc. innovate? The answer of course was they couldn’t and the product was therefore not a great success  – something therefore had to change.

The good news is that EVO:RAIL has become VxRail and it will be sold exclusively by VCE (a VMware and EMC company). Also with EVO:RAIL there was a very limited choice of hardware, you had to start with four nodes, scale in four node increments and use vSphere Enterprise Plus licences – VxRail on the other hand:

• Has a wide choice of hybrid-flash and all-flash configurations
• Will be able to start with just two nodes and scale in one node increments
• Includes vSphere Standard and vCenter licenses

This is exactly what most customers are looking for and I believe will enable VxRail to be the huge success that EVO:RAIL could never be.

Most organisations could run their entire vSphere environment in just 2U on all-flash

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… and large organisations can scale to meet their exact needs

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So what are the extra bits of software from VCE?

• CloudArray Virtual Edition – acts as a local storage target, with support for iSCSI, CIFS and NFS, that replicates the data to most S3 compliant public cloud object storage platforms (15 VMs per appliance)
• RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines – vSphere Web Client managed VM-level replication with support for consistency groups, up to 90% bandwidth savings and synchronous/asynchronous/continuous RPOs (10 TB cloud storage licence per appliance)
• Data Domain integration with VDP – the included vSphere Data Protection (powered by EMC Avamar) has optimised integration with the EMC de-duplication appliance

The importance of a single point of support

The fact that VxRail comes with a single point of support for all hardware and software (vSphere, Virtual SAN and the VCE components) is in many ways the number one reason to invest in the product – anyone who has worked in IT for a long-time knows that reducing the number of contact points for support will save a considerable amount of time and significantly reduce the Time-to-Resolution – no other HCI product can provide support on the entire stack, including vSphere.

Related Posts

1. VMware Virtual SAN is now ready for mainstream adoption
2. An introduction to VMware Virtual SAN Software-Defined Storage technology
3. EMC RecoverPoint is now storage agnostic
4. EMC Data Domain backup and archive storage – now compelling for organisations of all sizes

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Mark Burgess

Mark Burgess has worked in IT since 1984, starting as a programmer on DEC VAX systems, then moving into PC software development using Clipper and FoxPro. From here he moved into network administration using Novell NetWare, which kicked-off his interest in storage. In 1999 he co-founded SNS, a consultancy firm initially focused on Novell technologies, but overtime Virtualisation and Storage. Mark writes a popular blog and is a frequent contributor to Twitter and other popular Virtualisation and Storage blog sites.

http://blog.snsltd.co.uk

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