EMC World 2015 is kicking off with a bang with the debut of a new hyperconverged rack from VCE that can pack up to 1,000 commodity compute nodes into an ultra-dense configuration that takes a page directly from the book of the world’s largest data center operators. The launch expands an already aggressive VCE effort to address the evolving scalability requirements of the enterprise.

Modern workloads, such as cloud services and analytics, require the ability to quickly and cost-effectively scale as demand grows, a need that is difficult to meet with conventional integrated systems such as VCE’s first-generation Vblocks. The new VxRack reduces the increments at which more resources can be added to a fraction of  what was previously needed, thereby enabling applications to grow much more smoothly.

That can not only help organizations keep up with the needs of their users more efficiently but also has the potential to lower the obstacles that have traditionally hindered the adoption of new technologies such as Hadoop. VCE deliberately only charges based on the number of nodes installed in a VxRack, which is ideal for pilot projects that start out small but can grow exponentially with time.

That’s useful not only for enterprises trying to address internal requirements but also providers serving external customers. VCE envisions its VxRacks being used mainly for tier-two applications in both scenarios, with more important applications relegated to its Vblock and newer VxBlock systems, which are fully interoperable with one another thanks to the common management software released earlier this year.

Organizations will be able to choose from different configuration based on their requirements. The first model due to hit the market is the VxRack 1032, which uses the ScaleIO storage platform from EMC to handle data and offers a selection of hypervisors to run on the nodes inside. Two more variations are reportedly in the pipe, one of which will be based on VMware’s hyper-converged management stack while another is set to incorporate its recently launched containerization tools to support composite cloud services.

All three models will ship with integrated 10Gb switches, presumably from Cisco Systems Inc., which sold most of its stake in VCE last year due to intensifying competition with VMware but remains a key networking supplier. There’s no official word on pricing or availability as of yet.