When it comes to the hyper-converged market, Dell EMC VxRail cannot be ignored. Since its inception in 2014, VxRail has maintained rapid growth.
According to the "Quarterly Tracking Report on the Global Converged System Market" released by IDC, in the first quarter of 2020, Dell Technology Group ranked first in the hyper-converged market with a total market share of 33.6% and US$660 million. In addition, the second-quarter financial report of Dell Technology Group also shows that VxRail has achieved double-digit order growth for the second consecutive quarter, becoming the most trusted hyper-converged choice for global users in the process of comprehensive digital transformation.
So, as the only hyper-converged product independently developed and manufactured by the Chinese team in Dell Technology Group, what is the unique competitiveness of Dell EMC VxRail? More importantly, from the continuous iteration and evolution of Dell EMC VxRail, what new changes in the hyper-converged market can we see from it?
Continue to lead the hyper-converged market
Undoubtedly, as an important architectural approach for software-defined data centers, hyper-convergence has quickly won market acceptance in the past few years. Among them, the hyper-converged solutions represented by Dell EMC VxRail, through continuous innovation and iteration, have laid a solid foundation for users to recognize, accept, and widely apply hyper-converged solutions to realize the deployment of hyper-converged infrastructure. Several dimensions to make observations:
1. From an architectural perspective, different from the traditional hyper-converged architecture platform, Dell EMC VxRail has a unique and optimized system management mode. It does not need to be like a traditional architecture. Servers and storages require complicated and cumbersome management interfaces, unlike other systems. The hardware and software of hyper-converged products need to be managed separately. The data center established by VxRail only needs one management interface (vCenter) to realize the unified management of hardware, software, hyper-converged system and virtualized environment, which is the management integration level of all data center solutions. The highest platform.
Second, from a product perspective, Dell EMC VxRail helps enterprise users better apply new hyper-converged technologies to achieve "cost reduction and efficiency" of infrastructure, and at the same time enriches the hyper-converged product line to meet the innovation of different enterprise application scenarios demand. At present, VxRail hyper-convergence provides the industry's richest product series, including P series for key business scenarios; V series for VDI application scenarios; G series for artificial intelligence applications; E series for entry-level markets; S series for optimization of storage resources ; D series is aimed at edge and extreme application environment and so on.
Third, from the perspective of innovation, facing the rise of hybrid multi-cloud, Dell EMC VxRail has also proved that through continuous restructuring and innovation, it has taken the lead in the industry to create a new form of VCF on VxRail hyper-converged software and hardware integration for customers. The transformed cloud "base", this product is deeply integrated with VMware to realize fully automated installation, configuration, and upgrade from VxRail hardware to VCF 4.0 software, greatly reducing the difficulty of infrastructure operation and maintenance, and not only can support faster The transformation of enterprise application modernization has also accelerated the development of a new era of hybrid multi-cloud.
It can be seen that through continuous reconstruction and innovation, Dell EMC VxRail hyper-convergence enables it to play an important role in enterprise productivity transformation, enterprise-level consistent architecture, and future application delivery of cross-cloud modern architecture. This is optimization The long-term return on investment of users' hyper-convergence, the provision of personalized choices and the rapid integration and application of new technologies will provide more important support.
Uncover the hero behind the scenes
Not only that, in the process of the development and growth of Dell EMC VxRail, a "behind the scenes hero" also played a key role-this is Intel, with the powerful Intel Optane persistent memory, Intel Optane solid state disk (SSD), second With the "blessing" of the Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Dell EMC VxRail has reached a new level in terms of performance, integration, and total cost of ownership (TCO).
First of all, in terms of performance, Intel Optane SSDs have a speed close to DRAM, a higher storage density than DRAM, and can provide a lower memory price per TB than DRAM. At the same time, Intel Optane SSDs can provide excellent low latency, high durability and consistent responsiveness, and support simultaneous reading and writing, which is also a big advantage compared to high-speed NAND SSDs.
ESG tests show that Dell EMC VxRail hyper-convergence equipped with Intel Optane SSDs has increased transaction volume per minute (TPM) by up to 61%, input/output operations per second (IOPS) by up to 22%, and reduced latency. Up to 59%. This not only significantly improves the performance of business-critical workloads, but also enables Dell EMC VxRail to support multiple mixed workloads in the same cluster and reduce the negative impact on workloads.
Currently, Dell EMC VxRail P-series, E-series and G-series systems are equipped with 375 GB fast cache and equipped with Intel Optane SSDs that use NVMe interface specifications. Take Dell EMC VxRail P580N as an example. Compared with the previous generation product, the VxRail P580N full NVMe four-way platform doubles the CPU and memory capacity for each system. On this basis, VxRail P570N using Intel Optane persistent memory can also support higher virtual machine and workload density, thereby improving the performance of modern databases and applications.
Secondly, in terms of integration, as a one-stop hyper-converged system, Dell EMC VxRail is faster and more convenient to install, expand and upgrade. It only takes a few minutes to start and run a virtual machine (VM) on the new hardware, which means that customers can get support for hardware and VMware software through the "one-stop" service provided by Dell EMC VxRail, including VMware vSAN, VMware Cloud Foundation, etc. are all supported.
It is worth mentioning that Dell EMC VxRail can also be deployed as a standalone device or as a fully integrated rack. At the same time, coupled with the use of Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel Optane solid state disks, users can also add a single ultra The scale of converged equipment accelerates the application, and obtains high-performance intelligent features, data durability and higher capacity at a lower cost.
Finally, in terms of overall TCO, the Dell EMC VxRail equipped with Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel Optane solid-state drives, if compared with the traditional system environment, the company’s five-year operating expenditure (OpEx) has been reduced by up to 52%. In addition, compared with "self-assembled" hyper-converged infrastructure systems, the cost can be reduced by as much as 43%.
Taking the processing of critical workloads as an example, Dell EMC VxRail can be configured with more than 24 TB of persistent memory, which is very suitable for running database management systems (DBMS) such as SAP HANA and Microsoft SQL Server. The benefits include lower total cost of ownership ( By reducing the number of servers and reducing the space occupied by the data center, the cost and complexity of the infrastructure are also reduced), increasing the database capacity, and improving the utilization of CPU, memory and storage.
The data shows that as of February 28, 2020, Dell Technology Group's VxRail products have been widely praised by customers, with an overall score of 4.5 points (out of 5 points). In addition, Dell Technology Group has also been recognized by analysts in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure in 2019, and won the “Leader” evaluation for the third consecutive time.
In general, Dell EMC VxRail, based on Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel Optane solid state drives, provides more sufficient memory capacity for demanding applications and workloads, while also truly solving performance-critical use cases. The limitation of medium DRAM cost and capacity has truly resolved the new challenges brought by critical load work applications, and laid a key foundation for Dell EMC VxRail to continue to "dominate" the hyper-converged market.
A new evolutionary revelation of hyper-fusion
We know that the advent of the hybrid multi-cloud era and the large-scale popularity of container technology represented by Kubernetes have rapidly transformed enterprise application architecture from resource orchestration (allocation) as the center to application orchestration (scheduling) as the center. Therefore, the current transition to hybrid cloud and cloud native based on hyper-converged infrastructure architecture is also becoming a new market trend.
This also means that the hyper-converged architecture must transform from the traditional "old three-tier" in the past to the modern "new three-tier". The so-called hyper-converged traditional "old three-tier" refers to the integration of computing, storage and network. Although the "old three-tier" can quickly turn the three-tier into one, the biggest problem is that it cannot meet the "sensitive" plus " The demand for steady state”; the hyper-converged modern “new three-tier” refers to the comprehensive innovation of the architecture layer, hybrid multi-cloud resource layer, and application delivery layer, so as to meet the digital transformation needs of enterprises in the new hybrid cloud era.
In this context, Dell Technology Group has also launched VCF on VxRail. As an innovative "integrated" work of Dell Technology Group, VCF on VxRail not only integrates an architecture platform, a hybrid multi-cloud resource platform and an application development and delivery platform, but also based on consistent The intelligent and transparent management of the hybrid multi-cloud resource platform by the flexible infrastructure can realize the two-way migration of dynamic load across the "edge-core-multi-cloud", support cross-cloud technology integration and core system upgrades, and better ensure continuous modern applications deliver.
In this process, Intel Optane persistent memory’s original multiple working modes can also greatly improve the practicability of VCF on VxRail scene applications: On the one hand, the “memory mode” in Intel Optane persistent memory can be greatly improved. Memory capacity and lower cost support more virtual machines, and allocate more memory for each virtual machine. With this mode, customers can achieve greater memory capacity at a lower cost, thereby supporting larger databases . At the same time, as the memory capacity increases, the density of virtual machines, containers, and applications can also be increased, and the utilization of the processor will also increase.
On the other hand, the "App Direct mode" in Intel Optane persistent memory can achieve larger memory capacity and data persistence, so that the software can access DRAM and Intel Optane persistent memory as two layers of memory. This reduces the complexity of the stack and can make full use of the byte-addressable characteristics of persistent memory with cache coherence, and expand the use of persistent memory beyond the local node, thereby supporting larger data sets with consistent low latency This unique "flexibility" advantage will undoubtedly accelerate the process of cloud-native transformation and containerized applications in the hybrid multi-cloud era.
The full text concludes that from reconstructing the hyper-converged infrastructure to transforming the enterprise cloud data center, Dell EMC VxRail provides a complete set of hyper-converged solutions for enterprises to achieve a smooth transition from private cloud to hybrid cloud, and even public cloud. In the same way, Intel also played the role of "behind the scenes hero" in this process. The innovative hyper-converged solutions jointly created by the two parties can not only help enterprises achieve smooth upgrades of hyper-converged infrastructure, but also better carry users. The landing of key business applications can also minimize TCO costs, which can be said to truly provide stronger support for the digital transformation of enterprises.