EMC VxRack

VCE is the converged infrastructure business unit of EMC. It was developed as a joint project between EMC, VMware, and Cisco to build highly engineered and tested infrastructure foundations for the most business critical applications. There are three products in the lineup; Vblock, VxRack, and VxRail and all are developed to provide the highest level of availability and support. With a VCE solution, there is one point of contact for all support issues for hardware and software, EMC.

What is VxRack?

VxRack is a highly scalable, and flexible platform that is available in three types of nodes, Neutrino, SDDC, and Flex. Neutrino is designed for Open Stack and delivers a rack scale, turnkey Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. SDDC is a VMware based solution that utilizes VMware VSAN and can scale to hundreds of nodes. But,the type that I find most compelling is the Flex node.

VxRack Flex nodes are hypervisor agnostic and come in three types; flash, hybrid compute, and storage dense. A base configuration can start with as few as four nodes, but can scale to over 1000! How is this possible? Because the foundation of the Flex node is EMC’s ScaleIO software defined storage platform. ScaleIO aggregates the internal storage in the nodes into a pool utilized by all servers in the infrastructure. With the three types of nodes, VxRack can easily scale up for more compute, storage capacity, or both. It also allows for ultimate flexibility as resources can be added or removed as required. As nodes are added performance scales linearly allowing VxRack to handle the most demanding applications while optimizing performance automatically.

Finally, as an engineered solution everything has been tested, validated, and integrated for you. Compute, storage, and networking is optimized and easily managed through a single interface. Also, when an issue does arise, EMC is the single point of contact for support for everything removing the chance of vendor finger pointing when there is a problem.

Wrap up

The VxRack platform offers fantastic value and unparalleled scalability in a highly engineered package. The ability to easily scale from as few as four nodes to over 1000 means that it can handle even the most demanding workloads. Add to that simplified management and EMC’s industry leading support and you have a winning combination. If you would like additional information please visit the VCE website at http://www.emc.com/en-us/converged-infrastructure/vxrack-system-1000/index.htm.