Storage vendor EMC and virtualization specialist VMware have announced a new range of hyperconverged infrastructure appliances for vSphere-based environments, dubbed VxRail.

Taking up a single rack unit, individual VxRail appliances are much smaller than VBlocks, VxBlocks and VxRacks that comprise VCE’s current product line-up, since they don’t feature any networking equipment.

VxRail
VxRail – VCE

The hyperconverged appliances can be seen a response to systems from the likes of Nutanix and HPE aimed at simplifying the building of IT infrastructure.

A different mix

The new hardware combines the best of each vendor’s talents, they claim, blending EMC’s data services and systems management with a range of VMware’s hyper-converged software that includes vSphere, vCenter Server and Virtual SAN. The appliances were jointly engineered by the two vendors to integrate their respective virtualization and storage systems, and turn them into a ‘plug and play’ solution.

The collaborators aimed to create software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere in a single product family with one point of support, making them cheaper to manage.

Since they can be aggregated at great scale, the estate of VxRail appliances can grow from supporting two virtual machines (VMs) to thousands of VMs on a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ basis. The systems can be configured for performance-intensive workloads with up 76 TB of flash.

The new appliances can run EMC’s data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. In addition, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Virtual SAN, vSphere Data Protection and EMC Data Domain are all available.

Meanwhile VCE’s all-new VxRail Manager will provide hardware awareness with instant notifications about the state of applications, virtual machines and events on the infrastructure. VxRail appliances can use EMC cloud tiering to extend to public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Virtustream.

According to ESG research, hyperconverged infrastructure is being budgeted for by 70 percent of IT buyers in the next 24 months.

“The new appliances are eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures,” commented EMC Converged Platforms president Chad Sakac.

VxRail prices for small and medium businesses and remote offices start at around $60,000 and the new appliance family is due out by June 2016.