Dell Technologies Inc.’s Dell EMC subsidiary is using the VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week to refresh its hyperconverged infrastructure lineup, with an aim to support VMware Inc. customers.

It’s also adding a data protection service for customers with very large backup and recovery needs. New HCI platforms include a speedier version of the company’s VxRail turnkey appliance and VxRack software-defined data center systems, both with enhanced VMware-native features. Dell EMC also said its HCI line will run on 40 different configurations of its PowerEdge servers.

Version 4.5 of VxRail features up to 50 percent better input/output performance and up to 35 percent faster response times, the company claimed. The new server is also designed to be simpler to deploy, with features that make setting up multiple nodes as easy as deploying one. Updating is easier thanks to REST-based application program interfaces that can be used to deliver software upgrades across the entire cluster simultaneously. VMware’s vSAN encryption is now built-in.

“Dell EMC has the broadest portfolio of converged and hyperconverged products on the market today and VMware is the most important player in that market,” said Stu Miniman, senior analyst at the research firm Wikibon, a sister company of SiliconANGLE. “Their positioning is that they’re the only rack-scale hyperconverged solution built with VMware, and they have multiple ways you can take advantage of that: VXRail, VXRack and build your own.”

The new VxRack was co-designed with VMware for 80 percent more efficient management, said Bob Wambach, vice president of marketing in Dell EMC’s Converged Platforms and Systems division. It includes automation of the full VMware stack as well as support for VMware’s Horizon 7.1 virtual desktop infrastructure.

“This is turnkey hybrid cloud at rack scale,” Wambach said. “You can run any application workload either on-premises or in public clouds.” He added that the new VxRack is the “best Cloud Foundry environment,” referring to the platform-as-a-service from VMware sister company Pivotal Inc.

VxRack SDDC will natively support Dell EMC’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud platforms, which simplify the path to a hybrid cloud operating model via full lifecycle management and single-point-of-contact support. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is now fully available on VxRack SDDC and Native Hybrid Cloud support is available via an early access program.

Protecting complex environments

On the data protection front, Dell EMC’s engineered its Data Protection Suite for Applications to target VMware sites with large and complex environments. “Many customers are now managing 50- and 60-terabyte databases,” said Ruya Atac-Barrett, senior director of data protection product marketing at Dell EMC. “VM sprawl and stronger regulatory requirements are making data protection more challenging. Legacy products don’t support what customers need. Data protection needs to be zero-touch and near-instant.”

With that in mind, Dell EMC has built extensive automation and native integration with VMware vSphere into a software-defined data protection architecture that the company said simplifies backups and recoveries in large environments, both on-premises and in the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud.

The new release can deliver up to fivefold faster backups compared to traditional methods via a new data path that runs directly from the VMware hypervisor to the Dell EMC Data Domain. Application database owners can administer their own data protection needs. The software discovers copies across an enterprise and enables administrators to manage them within the existing service level objectives and policies.

The upgraded suite also offers extensive support for converged infrastructures, in particular VxRail appliances. Availability on Microsoft SQL Server is set for next month with support for Oracle Corp. databases planned for the fourth quarter. The company said it will announce flexible consumption models but didn’t provide specifics.

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Photo: Dell EMC