The New Normal: Operating at the Speed of Cloud

As the leader of our global Converged Platforms sales team I spend the majority of my time on the road meeting and talking to customers to ensure I understand their concerns and challenges. Digital transformation is a constant theme that comes up in almost every conversation. Organizations everywhere rely on technology more than ever to provide new services and business value to their customers. There is a real sense of urgency behind this because if you don’t transform, your competitor will. It’s about disrupting yourself or getting disrupted by the competitor. Just look at the impact of Uber on the taxi industry or Netflix on the home entertainment market.

This sense of urgency has been compounded by the advent of cloud native (born in the cloud) applications, which are driven by the megatrends of mobile and social media. IT teams, under pressure from the wider business to move fast and innovate quickly, have often used public cloud for their cloud native development projects. Others have adopted hyper-converged appliances created from industry standard servers, coupled with software defined storage.  As a result the market for hyper-converged has exploded into life recently.

Most vendors playing in the hyper-converged space have been focused on the low end play. The products they offer often fail to deliver on the key requirements: an ability to start small but scale up to webscale when the demand shoots up, and do it rapidly without impacting the performance of the infrastructure! This is at the heart of the problem often highlighted by customers who are experimenting with hyper-converged infrastructure.

The Converged Platforms Division is well known for its ability to anticipate customers’ VxRack_3challenges and provide solutions. Yet again we were ahead of the curve and responded to our customers’ needs with the VCE VxRack family which consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. With a flexible, modular design, the VxRack family can meet the performance and efficiency requirements of modern data centers. Customers can start with a small deployment, and then flexibly scale out to support dynamic workloads and evolving business needs.

The VxRack family supports the deployment of a variety of application workloads allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency. It also allows customers to reduce cost and risk by buying versus building an infrastructure platform that can run traditional business applications or deploy cloud-native applications.

Recently our VxRack Node was put through its paces – IDC interviewed 10 organizations that are supporting various business operations with the EMC ScaleIO software-defined block storage in combination with VxRack. This IDC study calculated that that these organizations will realize business value worth an average of $1.74 million over five years. As a result, IDC projects that these organizations will achieve an average return on investment (ROI) of 505% and break even on their investment in eight months.

Agility, unparalleled performance, scale as you grow, flexible configurations and unified management are some of the key benefits of VCE VxRack Family and it’s not surprising that VxRack is quickly being adopted into the datacenters around the world!

Find out more about the VxRack Family

About the Author: Burney Barker