UPDATED 17:30 EDT / JANUARY 09 2018

INFRA

Dell EMC answers HCI naysayers with custom servers for on-prem cloud

To set a group of techies squabbling, ask: Is hyperconverged infrastructure cloud? Some will insist it’s not; others will counter that it counts as private, on-premises cloud or that it’s cloud-like. Perhaps some HCI setups can provide a highly configurable experience to rival public cloud; at any rate, purist definitions of cloud hardly concern satisfied HCI users.

Dell EMC’s refreshed HCI offerings could fit the on-prem cloud bill, and, ironically, its the hardware cloudifying them, according to the company.

“The fallacy that people assume when we talk about hyperconverged, which is built on top of software-defined-storage, is that hardware doesn’t matter,” a Dell EMC exec told SiliconANGLE Media.

The software-defined-storage layer is a huge, potent factor, he acknowledged. However, HCI uses commodity hardware, and that can obscure the fact that it still does much heavy lifting. Commodity doesn’t mean null; different hardware servers ensembled with the same software will ultimately jam out unique tunes.

You get a very different experience when you have built purpose-built hardware that takes advantage and integrates well with the software-defined layer than if you just throw it on top of a whitebox server,” according to Dell EMC. This is why Dell EMC just wrapped its PowerEdge 14th generation servers into its HCI products.

Dell EMC was touting the benefits of made-for-HCI hardware in an interview at the SiliconANGLE Media Boston Studio. Dell EMC execs spoke to Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell EMC now leads the HCI market, according to research from IDC. It has busily upgraded its HCI portfolio over the past two years. It has introduced new software capabilities; for instance, while it used to use hybrid storage exclusively, it now offers all-flash.

The new PowerEdge servers tune the appliances at a deep level for HCI-specific performance. They are pre-optimized for HCI, which results in whole solutions that are more “purposeful, predictable and polished” than before, Dell EMC claims.

Devil’s in the hardware details

“It’s all about the software — or so a software vendor would say,” said Chad Dunn, vice president of product management and marketing at Dell EMC. “When you’re treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together in perfect unison as a system,” he said. This is why hardware tailored and fine tuned for the software results in a superior HCI experience, he added.

“Perfect unison” in Dell EMC’s new HCI systems on PowerEdge servers means boot devices, network connectivity, 12 pieces of firmware and more, all updating and life-cycling in context of one another. “Having direct and deep meaningful access to that hardware is critically important when you’re operating a system like this,” Dunn said.

The new PowerEdge servers offer a 2x performance improvement over the previous generation. One measure of this is their predictably low latency, with sub-millisecond response time even at very high input/output per second, Dunn explained.

Watch the complete video interview with Chad Dunn below:

The improved appliances are also vastly configurable to give a more cloud-like experience on-prem, Dell EMC execs explained.

Dell EMC XC Series and VxRail appliances on PowerEdge 14th-generation servers perform across millions of flexible configuration options for the full gamut of HCI use cases. “With VxRail, we can deliver two times the IOPS than we could on previous generation servers. That allows us to power tremendous mission-critical workloads,” Gallagher said.

Customers can select processors, drives, memory and more to suit specific workloads. Graphics processing units are also an option for video processing applications. The new HCI systems are ideal for almost any workload, Dunn stated, noting super write-intensive big data applications as a possible exception.

But, but, but — is it cloud?

The on-prem, true private cloud market is growing at a 30 percent compound annual growth rate, according to Wikibon.com researchers. That’s twice the rate of infrastructure as a service and public cloud. 

Is HCI private cloud? Is it better than cloud? First, deconstruct what customers purchase when they purchase a cloud service. They are basically specifying a certain configuration based on IOPS, capacity, etc., Dell EMC pointed out.

“You’re not specifying drive types; you’re not specifying network connectivity ports options,” the company said. Yet drive types and network connectivity options are available in Dell EMC’s new HCI products.

Also, purpose-built servers render HCI that more closely mimics a cloud experience on-prem than non-custom servers could, the company contends. “When you want to replicate that experience on-prem, you’ll need an infrastructure that consolidates all those things together. Trying to build on-prem cloud infrastructure on top of traditional infrastructure is a huge hurdle,” according to Dell EMC. Consolidated storage and compute form a simple foundation on which to layer a service catalog. 

Cloud’s limitless scale-out potential is a huge selling point — can an HCI appliance compete? Dell EMC’s HCI appliances built with new PowerEdge servers can plug into older versions — the 13th or 12th generations, according to John Shirley, director of product management and technical marketing at Dell EMC.

“We’ll be able to plug that into customer’s existing ecosystem,” Shirley told theCUBE. This provides a means to scale and also to save the costs of chucking older servers, he added.

Watch the complete video interview with John Shirley below:

Off-prem noun or on-prem verb?

Cloud is not a place, but an operating model, according to Jon Siegal, vice president of product marketing at Dell EMC. “What it’s all about is providing that turnkey, self-service type experience regardless of where the data is,” he told theCUBE. “We want to make the on-prem experience as cloud-like a possible, and we think that starts with the critical foundation of HCI.”

This is a familiar story these days from infrastructure companies, like Dell EMC partner Nutanix Inc. It’s a no-brainer that cloud is hotter than hardware, so why wouldn’t it paint its appliances with the cloud marketing brush?

“The [information technology] industry has a habit of bending and distorting any technical term until the meaning is no longer clear,” wrote consultant and tech writer Trevor Pott on Stratoscale.com. “Hyperconverged infrastructure vendors are among those driving the dilution of the term cloud. HCI takes multiple physical computers and binds their internal storage into shared storage useful for virtualization. This is clustering with added features, but it is not cloud computing.”

Do customers care? A 2016 ESG survey found that 70 percent of IT respondents planned to use HCI. That’s because HCI meets customers where they are on the bridge from hardware to cloud, Gallagher pointed out. Most companies today are wobbling through a transformation to some version of cloud, private or public.

“You cannot do IT transformation without buying a transformative product,” claims Dell EMC. 

Watch the complete video interview with Jon Siegal below:

(* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored these segments of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC, nor other sponsors, have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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