Is your data center enabling you to transform how you operate and be the strategic partner to your business that you want to be? Let’s face it, today’s data centers are challenged with poor resource utilization, growing complexity, limited and stringent scalability, siloed resources and perhaps the biggest challenge is the time spent and IT resources dedicated on “keeping the lights on.” Also, let’s not forget that the increasing cost pressures, technology changes and the advent of game-changers like the third platform applications, such as cloud, big data, mobile and social applications, which are forcing IT executives to look at how to deliver IT differently.
So what do you do? Well, the good news is that solving these challenges is why VCE was created, and it’s also where VCE provides tremendous value. And we are further expanding our value proposition to customers by introducing brand-new converged infrastructure platforms and solutions to drive your “Speed to Value”.
Introducing Vblock System 540
Today, we’re introducing three new Vblock Systems – the VCE Vblock System 240, 540, and 740. The Vblock System 240 and 740 are driving some fantastic incremental leaps in performance and capability. The big news, however, is the new Vblock System 540 – the industry’s first all-flash converged infrastructure for high performance mixed workloads and emerging third platform applications, delivering scale-out performance at ultra-low latency and superior flexibility to handle multiple tier one workloads.
Let’s take a closer look…
Lighting Speed Application Response – Vblock System 540 is based on industry’s leading EMC XtremIO all-flash array, delivering >1M IOPS, with uniquely consistent sub-millisecond application response times.
Linear Growth – The scale-out architecture uniquely allows our customers to expand both performance and capacity, starting with a single XtremIO X-Brick and adding X-Bricks as the consolidated workloads grow – with no single point of failure. In addition Vblock System 540 supports up to 192 Cisco UCS M4 blade servers bringing 1.5X compute memory compared to M3.
Optimal End-user Experience – Rich data services like in-line de-duplication, storage compression, space-efficient writeable copies, and thin provisioning delivers scale-out performance and optimal end-user experience. It also ensures that flash data services are optimized for predictable performance at low latency, inline, all the time!
Superior Performance – The scale-out system requires no tuning for any workload combinations and leverages a unique flash-optimized data protection algorithm (XDP) to deliver superior performance, protection, and usable capacity. The next-generation Cisco Unified Computing M4 blades, Cisco Nexus ACI-ready networking and MDS also provide unprecedented performance for application deployment and operations.
Automation – Vblock System 540 with Cisco Nexus 9396PX switches and ACI will take full advantage of application policy-based templates that automate the provisioning of network resources, application services, security, segmentation and workload placement.
Superior TCO with a smaller data center and power footprint – Vblock System 540 only includes a half-rack footprint, all-flash data reduction and the highest CPU availability. Designed for optimal energy efficiency, the new VCE intelligent cabinet 2.0 enables advanced power and environmental monitoring and security.
And let’s talk about the range of use cases the Vblock System 540 covers…
- Mixed high performance workloads, such as databases, virtual server, data warehouse, business applications and end-user-computing environments, can be virtualized and consolidated where extreme performance and scalable capacity is needed, while meeting all SLAs
- Dev/Test Environments – With space-efficient snapshots and cloning, hundreds of full-performance writeable instances can be deployed instantly with no capacity impact
- Real-time Analytics and On-Demand Reporting—Production OLTP, ETL, and OLAP can be combined onto the Vblock System for instant business intelligence
- Mission-critical workload virtualization
- Big Data / Analytics and End User Computing – Vblock System 540 combined with VCE Technology Extension for Storage with Isilon
Introducing the VCE Integrated Solutions for Cloud Management
The second big thing we are unveiling today are VCE Integrated Solutions for Cloud Management. These solutions build on the proven success of the “VCE Experience” by extending our approach of factory pre-integration, pre-testing and pre-validation to cloud management software. These new solutions, incorporating software from both Cisco and VMware, are delivered and supported by VCE as a single product, with seamless component-level updates, lifecycle management and end-to-end vendor accountability, VCE Integrated Solutions for cloud management empower IT to focus on innovation and be a strategic business enabler.
Simplified Operations – By integrating VMware and Cisco cloud stacks and technologies, VCE offers an out-of-box private cloud solution to deliver virtual machine as a service (VMaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), paving the path for higher level services and giving customers choices based on their preferences.
Choice and Flexibility – VCE introduces two integrated solutions for cloud management with VMware and with Cisco, respectively. Customers can select solutions based on their existing partnership with vendors and deployment preferences.
Fast Time to Value – The pre-integrated, pre-validated cloud management software stacks with essential, brief on-site configuration recommendations and services provide everything needed to rapidly deliver VMaaS in a cost-effective way.
Introducing VCE Technology Extensions
Third up in the big announcement line-up are the new VCE technology extensions – platforms from EMC and Cisco that are pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated to enable additional flexibility and scalability for new and existing Vblock Systems.
The first of these is the VCE technology extension for EMC Isilon storage. This solution allows a “side-car” approach to the Vblock System with powerful scale-out storage to cost-effectively consolidate and manage enterprise data and applications. As a result, customers can now expand and extend their Vblock Systems to incorporate large-scale user data for VDI, highly efficient enterprise data lakes for big data and Hadoop data analytics, as well as scale-out NAS. Additionally, by enabling multi-use, multi-protocol and multi-tenant capabilities, the VCE technology extension for EMC Isilon storage accelerates adoption of emerging applications, such as Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
The second of these is the VCE technology extension for Cisco UCS compute. Just as exciting as the Isilon extension, this solution utilizes an enclosure of Cisco Unified Computing technology to power compute-intensive applications, such as specialized graphics processing, performing seismic modeling, handling digital media transcoding and complying with HIPAA privacy and security regulations.
Bottom line
Our customers select VCE as their partner and Vblock Systems as their converged infrastructure in their journey to cloud and delivering IT as a Service. True converged infrastructure and now the new VCE Technology Extensions and Integrated Solutions enable data centers to be more easily expandable, optimized, agile and flexible, significantly simplifying application deployment and overall data center operations. This in return, frees up your IT staff to concentrate on taking care of initiatives that really matter to the business and increasing your bottom line!
To learn more about the new introductions, please visit