New hyper-converged appliances to optimize infrastructure and application delivery

Customers today are seeking appliance-based platforms to speed infrastructure, workload and application delivery. In response, Dell and VMware have partnered to deliver a new appliance aimed at delivering next generation building blocks for the data center.

[View:http://youtu.be/0OMSVyAC1Eo:550:0]

About the Solution

The Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL combine Dell 2U/4 node servers and virtual infrastructure management software from VMware into a hyper-converged appliance, helping customers achieve faster time-to-value, provide elasticity to their environments, and enable greater ease of use to speed infrastructure and application workload delivery. Together we’re creating a transformative user experience for our customers for their virtual infrastructure, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), private cloud and general-purpose workloads.

Customer benefits from the solutions include:

• Achieve faster-time-to-value – Turnkey integrated system that can be deployed in minutes
  • Deploy VMs in just 15 minutes from power on versus days if components were installed separately
  • Leverage pre-configured & workload-optimized
  • Adopt a simplified appliance-based solution a with streamlined software-defined management experience

• Provide elasticity to your environment – Provide maximum flexibility and agility to your data center 
  • Rapidly expand capacity with auto discovery of new infrastructure 
  • Gain linear scaling and performance to meet growing user and business needs
  • Achieve a more ideal density to cost ratio

• Enable greater ease of use – Provides an intuitive, consumerized user interface for ease of configuration and management
  • Operate with a single-pane-of glass management experience
  • Use out-of-the-box integrations with existing VMware management tooling

Dell and VMware have thousands of successful joint customers in the market who are achieving great results with their infrastructure, software and services that both companies have provided. As a result, Dell was a selected as a key partner by VMware to help them take to market this exciting new opportunity for customers.  Here are just a few of the reasons why customers should choose Dell:

• Offers a finely tuned integrated system to maximize performance (through co-engineering with VMWare)
• Delivered on a hyper-converged platform with optimal density to cost ratio
• Single source for technical support as well as value added deployment, consulting, and managed services
• Extensible management from Dell including data protection, security, performance monitoring, and cloud management solutions

Technical Details and Specifications

The Dell Engineered Solution(s) for VMware EVO: RAIL is an integrated hyper-converged solution that is ordered as a single bundle (not piece parts) and comes pre-installed with all required software components. The appliance has 4 server nodes/blades enclosed within a single 2U chassis and offers 192 GB of physical memory per node, 13.1TB of tiered storage (Solid State and SAS) and 10GbE Ethernet.

The software component delivers the radically new, end-to-end user experience that drives simplicity. The software streamlines initial setup, provisioning of virtual infrastructure and ongoing operations with an easy to use interface.  The software is built and optimized for the new VMware user as well as for experienced administrators.  Minimal IT experience is required to deploy, configure, and manage EVO: RAIL, allowing it to be used where there is limited or no IT staff on-site.  As EVO: RAIL utilizes VMware’s core products like vCenter and vSAN, administrators can apply existing VMware knowledge, best practices, and processes.

The other key component is VMware’s vSAN software. vSAN is a new software-defined storage tier for VMware vSphere, bringing the benefits of the software defined data center to storage. By clustering server hard disk and solid state drives (HDDs and SSDs), Virtual SAN creates a flash-optimized, highly resilient shared datastore designed for virtual environments.  The solution also contains familiar VMware tooling of vCenter and vSphere that allows VMware administrators to leverage and apply existing VMware knowledge, best practices and processes.  

[View:http://youtu.be/l37dokaZ7zY:550:0]

The solution includes:

 How it Works & How it Scales

Once the initial set up is complete which involves 4 simple steps, EVO: RAIL implements data services, creates the new ESXi hosts, and configures vCenter Server. EVO: RAIL Management provides a dashboard to view all virtual machines and arrange them with sorting and filtering. Users create virtual machines with only a few clicks to select the guest OS, VM size, VLAN, and security options. Finally, it simplifies virtual machine sizing by offering single-click small, medium, and large configurations, as well as single-click security policies.

Each appliance has four independent nodes with dedicated compute, network, storage, and management resources. Fault tolerance, reliability, and automatic scale-out are key features.