VCE Unveils Hyperconverged Rack Configured as VMware SDDC

Moving to bring the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure to IT environments running VMware on rack systems, VCE unveiled an implementation of the VCE VxRack System that comes preconfigured with VMware EVO SDDC software at the VMworld 2015 conference on Monday.

Based on the same software-defined data center (SDDC) technology that VMware created for blade servers, VMware EVO SDDC is an instance of an SDDC that has been specifically designed to run on rack servers. As a sister company of EMC, VCE is making EVO SDDC available on rack servers alongside the blade servers that VCE pre-configures with EVO:RAIL software.

Nina Hargus, chief marketing officer for VCE, said that in general IT organizations are realizing they are spending a lot of time on lower level hardware and software integration tasks that don’t add much in the way of real value to the business.

“We let customers spend less time non-differentiated tasks,” said Hargus. “Our goal is to simplify infrastructure all the way down to the hypervisor.”

That issue is particularly vexing, noted Hargus, at a time when IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to build private clouds. The VCE systems not only simplify the building and deployment of those clouds using VMware software, Hargus said the VCE systems also come with lifecycle management tools that make it easier to manage those clouds over the long term.

Scheduled to be available to order in the fourth quarter, Hargus noted that the VxRack System based on VMware EVO SDDC is engineered out of the factory in a way that is intended to enable IT organizations to be more agile in terms of how IT services are provided. In contrast, most existing rack system require a lot of additional systems integration work. Traditionally, however, IT organizations that prefer rack systems have preferred to use racks as a way to scale up and out compute, storage and networking independently from one another.

The degree to which IT organizations may be willing to make a shift to a more prescribed approach to rack systems remains to be seen. However, Hargus said the VxRack System based on VMware EVO SDDC is also at the heart of the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud platform rolled out today under the auspices of The EMC Federation, which consists of products and services spanning most of business units that make up EMC. As such, it’s likely in the months and years ahead a lot more IT organizations are about to be exposed to hyperconverged rack systems.