The Journey to Rack Scale

The Converged Infrastructure market today is an accelerating mainstream IT trend because it is the proven way to break down technology silos of compute, network and storage, while simplifying and transforming IT processes and operations.

Within this backdrop, we are seeing the emergence of platform 3 applications that have different characteristics from the legacy client-server applications prevalent in today’s data centers. As client-server applications grew to be more business critical over the past decade, increasing levels of robustness and data services were built into enterprise storage arrays, Storage Area Network fabrics and compute blade systems to provide business continuity, disaster recovery and data protection capabilities. In contrast, platform 3 applications – which were born in the cloud and largely tied to the megatrends of mobile computing and social media – were conceived to incorporate composite micro-services that eliminate the need for complicated IT infrastructure.

IT innovators and early adopters eager to explore platform 3 applications have often moved to public cloud for their platform 3 development projects. Others are adopting hyper-converged appliances created from industry standard servers with software defined storage, clustered together through high speed ethernet switches.

Together, public cloud and hyper-converged appliances represent a decentralization trend, driven by the rise of individual departments inside companies striving to meet their departments’ unique requirements – usually without regard of the ramifications to rest of the company or the company’s overall IT strategy.

The new reality now is the emergence of islands of hyper-converged offerings stacked together, and unmanaged public cloud consumption. Central IT, when they are unable to provide economical, scalable, easily provisioned resources to their departments, find they have decreasing influence with their lines of business. The result is cluttered, disparate collections of resources that can’t, and aren’t, shared across the company. It’s an inefficient use of budget dollars, as well as an inefficient use of the pools of resources that underpin the entire data center infrastructure.

The industry really has not fully considered the ramifications of this ad hoc approach.

But at VCE, we have. We believe you must design and engineer scalability upfront to plan for growth, and we have contemplated massively scalable, shared hyper-converged resources with independently scalable, industry standard based compute and software defined networking, all managed through a single interface. The next phase of evolution of CI is not simply the addition of hyper-converged capabilities, it’s hyper-converged at scale.

Today, VCE expands its portfolio with the introduction of VxRack Systems, a hyper-converged rack scale system that fits seamlessly together with our Vblock portfolio within the VCE Vscale architecture.

While the main focus for many large enterprises will continue to be the consolidation of mission critical applications into Vblock Systems and our recently announced VxBlock Systems, the next VxRack Systems represent the path to highly scalable platform 3 and XaaS for distributed tier 2 applications for those ready to deploy hyper-converged offerings that can start small and scale to many thousands of rack servers.

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Trey

About the Author: Trey Layton

Trey started his career in the US Military stationed at United States Central Command, MacDill AFB, FL. Trey served as an intelligence analyst focused on the Middle East and conducted support of missions in the first days of the war on terror. Following the military Trey joined Cisco where he served as an engineer for Data Center, IP Telephony and Security Technologies. Trey later joined the partner ecosystem where he modernized the practices of several national and regional partner organizations, helping them transform offerings to emerging technologies. Trey joined NetApp in 2004 where he contributed to the creation of best practices for Ethernet Storage and VMware integration. Trey contributed to the development of the architecture which became the basis for FlexPod. In 2010 Trey joined VCE, where he was promoted by Chairman & CEO, VCE, Michael Capellas to Chief Technology Officer, VCE. As CTO Trey was responsible for the product and technology strategy for Vblock, VxBlock, VxRack, Vscale and VxRail. During his tenure, VCE was recognized as one of the fastest technology companies to reach $1 Billion in revenues and one of the most successful joint ventures in IT history. The origional VCE products Trey has led strategy on continue to be leaders in their respective share categories around the world. In 2016 Trey was asked to lead from concept the development of an all Dell Technologies converged product. From that initial concept Trey led a global team of engineers to deliver Dell EMC PowerOne, the industry’s first autonomous infrastructure solution, embedding open source technologies which enable automated infrastructure integration based on declarative outcomes.