{"id":7735,"date":"2021-10-02T07:57:06","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T05:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/?p=7735"},"modified":"2021-10-02T07:57:07","modified_gmt":"2021-10-02T05:57:07","slug":"getting-to-know-and-understand-the-popular-dell-emc-hyper-converged-infrastructure-products","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/getting-to-know-and-understand-the-popular-dell-emc-hyper-converged-infrastructure-products\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to know, and understand, the popular Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure products"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> 3<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n

Gain insight into Dell EMC’s hyper-converged portfolio, including VxRail and XC Series appliances, VxRack System Flex plus vSAN, VxFlex and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"James<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By James Alan Miller<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyper-convergence integrates compute, networking, storage and virtualization resources inside appliances called nodes<\/em> that easily link up for scalability purposes. For the past 10 quarters in a row, Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure products have led the market, according to analyst firm IDC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IDC’s most recent Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker also found the\u00a0converged infrastructure market growing\u00a0by 3.5% year over year to $3.75 billion for the third quarter of 2019. Its research also revealed hyper-converged systems to be the fastest-growing type of converged system, estimating its value would hit $10.4 billion by 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure products come in several flavors. These include VxRail and XC Series appliances and VxRack System Flex, as well as vSAN, VxFlex and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes products.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Gain insight into Dell EMC’s\u00a0hyper-convergence offerings, and explore how the company incorporates\u00a0VMware vSAN, Nutanix hyper-convergence software and more into its product portfolio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a0XC Series<\/strong>\u00a0of hyper-converged appliances preintegrates Dell EMC 14th-generation x86 PowerEdge servers with\u00a0Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud\u00a0hyper-converged infrastructure storage and virtualization software stack and Acropolis OS through an OEM deal between the two vendors. Now on its third generation, the XC Series appliance comes in 1U single node, 2U (with up to four nodes) and 3U single node form factors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dell EMC will also configure XC Series appliances to order to support specific use cases.Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure products come in several flavors. These include VxRail and XC Series appliances and VxRack System Flex, as well as vSAN, VxFlex and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes products.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

XC Core<\/strong>\u00a0appliances use the same PowerEdge hardware as the XC Series but provide users another way to license\u00a0Nutanix hyper-converged software. Rather than coming preintegrated, organizations separately purchase the hyper-converged infrastructure software — which is supported directly by Nutanix — and install it on Dell EMC’s prevalidated XC Core systems themselves. Users can also update the hardware and software independently of one another. XC Core is available in 1U and 2U single node chassis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VxFlex OS<\/strong>\u00a0for appliances or racks is Dell EMC’s scale-out block storage service for creating virtual SANs or hyper-converged infrastructures on x86 PowerEdge server hardware.\u00a0VxFlex\u00a0is available for preconfigured and validated turnkey appliances (see Ready Nodes below) or in an integrated rack-scale hyper-converged system called VxRack Flex. The OS supports multiple hypervisors and bare-metal deployments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dell EMC offers individual appliances and integrated racks that run its VxFlex OS for creating virtual SANs or hyper-converged infrastructures on x86 PowerEdge servers.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

VxFlex Integrated Rack<\/strong>\u00a0is a rack-scale system composed of PowerEdge servers that includes up to 24 hyper-converged nodes per rack and is designed for use in heterogeneous environments with petabyte-scale implementations in mind. It uses the VxFlex OS (rebranded from ScaleIO) software-defined block storage, integrates configured and optimized networking through Dell or Cisco Nexus switches, and offers linear scalability.\u00a0VxFlex Integrated Rack\u00a0supports VMware vSphere, KVM or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors (bare metal is also an option) and offers factory-integrated Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection for Converged Infrastructure as an option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ready Nodes<\/strong>\u00a0are purpose-built PowerEdge server products that have been tested, validated and certified for specific hyper-convergence software that customers can install themselves to build out a hyper-converged infrastructure. The point is to reduce project risk, improve storage efficiency, simplify management and quicken scaling.\u00a0Dell EMC offers Ready Nodes\u00a0for vSAN (subsidiary VMware’s hyper-converged and software-defined storage software), VxFlex and\u00a0Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct\u00a0software-defined storage technology. Microsoft introduced Storage Spaces Direct with Windows Server 2016, adding support for it to Windows Admin Center to simplify management with Windows Server 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VxRail<\/strong>\u00a0is a preconfigured, pretested and fully integrated turnkey rack-scale hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. It is built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running VMware’s vSphere hypervisor and vSAN storage virtualization software. The five\u00a0versions of VxRail\u00a0are the G Series for mass-market and virtual desktop infrastructure use cases; E Series for remote office\/branch offices; V Series for VDI and high-end use cases; P Series for databases and business-critical heavy workloads; and S Series for collaboration, data and analytics.\u00a0Manage VxRail\u00a0VMs through vCenter Server, and integrate them into an IT infrastructure using vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation. Secure VxRail using Advanced Encryption Standard-256 cipher encryption at the vSAN cluster level and two-factor authentication (Common Access Card and SecurID). It also comes with agentless backup and recovery, replication and deduplication through vSphere Data Protection and RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines for disaster recovery and business continuity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Dell EMC VxRail appliance runs on VMware hyper-converged infrastructure software.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail<\/strong>\u00a0integrates software into the hyper-converged infrastructure appliance for creating or migrating an IT infrastructure to a hybrid private cloud. It does this by tightly integrating compute, storage and network provisioning across locations.\u00a0VMware Cloud Foundation\u00a0automates lifecycle management through SDDC (software-defined data center) Manager. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It also consists of vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage (via VxRail) and NSX for networking (called NSX-T for vSphere). Virtual Cloud Foundation bundles vRealize Suite for automation, operations management and analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> 3<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>Gain insight into Dell EMC’s hyper-converged portfolio, including VxRail and XC Series appliances, VxRack System Flex plus vSAN, VxFlex and Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes. By James Alan Miller Hyper-convergence integrates compute, networking, storage and virtualization resources inside appliances called nodes that easily link up for scalability purposes. For the past 10 quarters in a row, Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure products<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,35,4,30,317,318,3,28,33,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-practices-for-data-center-operations","category-data-center-facilities","category-datacenter-news","category-expert-advise-and-opinion","category-hyper-converged-systems","category-hyper-converged-vendors-and-products","category-industry-news-and-expert-advise","category-partner-content","category-partner-resources","category-storage-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7738,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7735\/revisions\/7738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}