Hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to give businesses of any size data center and cloud capabilities
AUSTIN, Texas – A little more than a month after closing its acquisition of EMC, the combined Dell EMC on Wednesday unveiled a new hyperconverged infrastructure solution touted by several executives as a “data center-in-a-box.”
The launch came during Dell EMC World. CEO Michael Dell called VxRail “The future of the data center.”
According to company literature, the new product takes 20 minutes to set up, five minutes to scale and lowers total cost of ownership by 30%.
David Goulden, president of Dell EMC’s infrastructure solutions group, explained a single VxRail appliance can run about 200 virtual machines with 108 cores in an entry-level unit that costs less than $50,000.
Following the VxRail announcement, Dell fielded questions including how a focus on data centers fits into the mobility trend of distributed architecture.
“When you get a smartphone,” he told assembled media and analysts, “it has nothing on it, it does nothing. All of the information you put on your smartphone comes from a data center. You upload something, it goes to a data center. For every new smartphone minted in the world, blip, another server pops up on the network.”
Earlier this year Dell EMC passed Hewlett Packard Enterprise in terms of global server shipments, but not revenue, according to Gartner. Research VP Jeffrey Hewitt said at the time, “Dell garnered 19.3% of the market and moved into the No. 1 position in worldwide server shipments due primarily to growth resulting from programs it has in place in the Asia/Pacific region, most notably China.”
The Dell EMC combination, first announced in the fourth quarter, is regarded as the largest buyout in tech history with a value of $67 billion. EMC is a major provider of cloud computing and data storage solutions, while Dell previously focused on servers and PCs. Another aspect of the combination is VMWare, a public company in which EMC holds a major stake, that makes software to enable multiple operating systems and applications to share a single physical server.
