No matter the product, a large purchase is an important decision—all the more so if it is for your business. But often times the choice we make—even after careful consideration and plenty of research—can leave us with a feeling of buyer’s remorse. In IT this could happen for any number of reasons—as change and churn occur, business needs evolve and requirements from development teams shift, and you may find yourself in an environment that you did not anticipate. What you really need then is a multi-talented, agile architecture designed with the future in mind. Luckily, this type of flexibility is exactly where VxFlex (formerly known as the Flex family) shines.
The VxFlex family is an offering within the Dell EMC HCI portfolio whose strength is its… you guessed it: FLEXibility! VxFlex can adapt to heterogeneous environments, support multi-hypervisor environments and bare metal options, and even give customers the ability to scale storage and compute independently or together. We can offer this while enabling a modular expansion that truly adds incremental IOPS and compute performance without introducing increased latency in an all flash solution.
The VxFlex family offers several deployment options depending on your needs. VxFlex Ready Nodes provide great flexibility through pre-validated and optimized HCI building blocks, whereas the integrated rack (formerly known as VxRack FLEX) is a fully engineered system with networking included that accelerates IT outcomes through full lifecycle management. Both are powered by VxFlex OS, the enabling software defined technology for the VxFlex family (with over an exabyte sold).
Since HCI is all about agility and simplicity, it was a logical next step for us to expand Dell EMC’s VxFlex portfolio with a new offering to complement the existing Ready Nodes and integrated rack. And that’s what we just announced at Dell Technologies World. I am excited to introduce the newest member of the family: VxFlex appliance!
VxFlex appliance offers a crucial middle ground by delivering many of the HCI benefits of a turnkey, integrated system (such as integrated lifecycle management, easy scale out capabilities, faster deployment and single source for support) but in a simplified and more economic form factor.
This new offering makes the VxFlex family even more versatile by taking the best of what’s offered in the Ready Node and integrated rack and blending it together with the power of VxFlex OS software to deliver the following flexibility and cost saving features:
- Bring your own networking (like Ready Node)
- Smaller starting point with massive growth potential (like Ready Node)
- Controller running on a VM saving you a management controller node (like Ready Node)
- Unified management with VxFlex Manager (like integrated rack)
- VxFlex OS for software defined (like the entire family)
Customers of all sizes and verticals are loving their transformation with VxFlex. From the biggest enterprises with over 3,500 nodes in their environment capable of millions of IOPs with consistent low latency to smaller companies just starting out with eight nodes (but with the ability to scale out as their needs grow)—VxFlex enables them to innovate and boldly go where no one has gone before and focus on what they do best to make the world a better place. These high-performance capabilities set VxFlex apart from other leading HCI appliances that support multi-hypervisor or bare metal environments. This enables us to offer you VxFlex as the premier HCI appliance option for these environment types with enterprise-grade resiliency and high performance for the fastest access to data and applications.
Regardless of the VxFlex family option you decide to adopt, you’ll benefit from one number to call for the full solution. Also, with all the underlying hardware, networking and VxFlex OS software under one roof, we can get innovation and new updates to you as fast as we can churn them out.
So, when it comes time for your next IT infrastructure decision, consider the newest addition to the VxFlex family. VxFlex appliance demonstrates Dell EMC’s continued investment and commitment to growing and innovating the VxFlex family, it’s a decision you won’t regret.
