Dell EMC Industry-Leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solutions Gain PowerEdge Boost

• Dell EMC to deliver hyper-converged infrastructure appliances on PowerEdge 14^th generation servers
• Offers customers improved performance and reliability with the world's most configurable hyper-converged infrastructure appliances as fully engineered systems with single source support¹
• Dell EMC VxRail customers to expect more powerful and predictable performance across millions of customized configurations to best optimize VMware vSAN
• Dell EMC XC Series customers offered higher performance for workloads, faster networking speeds and new NVMe/SSD configurations

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Dell EMC's industry leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio has received a substantial boost with the availability of Dell EMC HCI appliances on the newly designed, award-winning Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers.

With this latest PowerEdge server platform, designed and optimized for HCI, customers of all sizes can expect even more powerful and predictable performance with even greater configurability for hosting a wide-range of mission critical software applications on Dell EMC VxRail and XC Series appliances.

"Customers transforming their IT are increasingly turning to hyper-converged infrastructure as an ideal foundation for simplifying IT today and for the future," said Chad Sakac, president, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, Dell EMC "With HCI designed as a software-defined infrastructure, achieving ultimate performance and reliability relies on tightly engineering software with optimal hardware and its configurations. Dell EMC's turnkey, pre-integrated, tested and validated HCI appliances enable customers to simply stand-up and scale IT infrastructure, backed by trusted dependability and performance, to help IT organizations more easily meet the growing demands of their businesses."

According to IDC research, HCI is the fasted growing converged infrastructure segment, by far, with worldwide revenue growing 48.5% year over year in Q2 of 2017, now accounting for nearly 25% of overall converged infrastructure solutions sold. IDC research shows Dell EMC is No.1 in global HCI systems with 29% of all Q2 segment revenue and year over year revenue growth of 149%. Dell EMC VxRail is one of the fastest growing HCI appliances worldwide with rapid customer adoption driving more than 275% year-over-year revenue growth, more than 5.7X the market growth rate.²

Dell EMC VxRail and XC Series Offer Substantial Advancements with PowerEdge 14^th Generation Servers

Dell EMC now combines the simplicity, agility and scalability of its industry-leading HCI portfolio with the power and flexibility of next generation servers, designed and optimized for HCI. This offers greater performance and reliability to meet customer demands as HCI moves into core data centers and is relied on to run a wider range of applications and workloads.    

Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers, based on Intel^® Xeon^® Processor Scalable Family, include 150 custom requirements for software-defined storage (SDS) built-in, making it uniquely optimized for HCI. This includes improved support for SSDs in scale-out deployments; faster initialization and streamlined data storage management; increased drive cooling for improved reliability; and, optional, common user interfaces across server and HCI platforms for Dell EMC systems management capabilities.

The upgraded Dell EMC HCI appliance portfolio offers customers significantly faster access to applications and data thanks to higher core counts, faster clock frequency, more memory channels, and faster memory resulting in up to 1.7x more processing power and up to 62% higher internal bandwidth.³

Dell EMC HCI appliances include the Dell EMC VxRail Appliance family, powered by VMware vSAN™ and jointly engineered with VMware, and the Dell EMC XC Series, designed for customers seeking choice of hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V, or multi-hypervisor environments. These HCI appliances help simplify the entire lifecycle with advanced automation – with unique software that simplifies deployment, management, scaling, support and maintenance – making it easier for customers from day one.

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge 14^th Generation Servers

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances on PowerEdge 14^th generation servers offer more powerful and predictable performance across millions of flexible configuration options to meet any HCI use case and more demanding, mission-critical workloads in VMware environments. VxRail Appliance customers can expect:

• Better performance for the most demanding applications with up to 2X more IOPS (input/output operations per second), and more than 2x faster response times
• Highly dependable performance with 9x more predictable response times sustained at sub-one millisecond
• More options for perfectly right-sized deployments with millions more configurations including more processor options, new SATA SSDs, additional network connectivity options, and more GPU expansion to precisely match customers' HCI requirements without over provisioning
• Software-defined NAS support with Dell EMC Isilon SD Edge for remote office or edge-to-core file deployments, joining VxRail's remote replication, cloud object storage and manageability capabilities

Dell EMC XC Series Appliances on PowerEdge 14^th Generation Servers

Dell EMC XC Series on 14th Generation PowerEdge servers enables higher performance for workloads, faster networking speeds and new NVMe/SSD configurations. More specifically, with the new Dell EMC XC Series appliances, customers can expect:

• Increased performance for compute intensive workloads with up to 50% additional cores per appliance
• Up to 93% increased compute capability for workloads with storage density as a primary need
• Expanded use cases in VDI environments for sophisticated compute needs with up to 50% more GPU power

Availability

• Dell EMC VxRail Appliances on Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers are orderable today and will be generally available starting December 12, 2017.
• Dell EMC XC Series models XC640, XC740xd and XC740 on Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers are generally available today.

Analyst quote

Eric Sheppard, research director, Enterprise Storage & Converged Systems, IDC
"Hyper-converged systems make up the fastest growing segment of the converged systems market as we're seeing a sharp ramp of adoption across all kinds of industries, environments and use cases. Hyper-converged systems' simplicity of deployment, management and scale combined with tighter integration between technologies and proven architectures are key drivers for this growth. As the largest supplier of converged systems and hyper-converged systems, Dell EMC bringing to market more powerful and flexible HCI appliances should help meet the demands of customers looking to deploy even more enterprise workloads on Dell EMC systems."

Customer quotes

Frank Oldale, vice president of technology, First Credit Union
"It was time to replace our aging data center infrastructure, and our goal was to increase performance and scalability while lowering operating expenses. After a thorough review of options, we chose Dell EMC VxRail Appliances for our production and disaster recovery data center environments, working closely with Dell EMC and partner Turning Point on the migrations in July 2017. We already have seen a noticeable increase in virtual server performance, making interactions much faster for our employees, members and banking system processes. Our operating expense has reduced roughly 30 percent, power consumption is down 75 percent, and we now have an infrastructure in place to ensure performance, growth and lower overall costs to support our operational teams' goals." 

Ryan Kennedy, academic computing team manager, University of Reading
"The Dell EMC XC Series has enabled us to provide academics at the University of Reading reliable access to self-service computing resources, allowing them to complete critical research in a timely manner. We're looking forward to the new platform's capabilities to help us provide even greater performance and efficiency for expanding our Research Cloud."

Additional resources

• Direct2DellEMC Blog: The Best in Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Just Got Better
• Video: Dell EMC VxRail Appliances on 14^th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
• Visit the Dell EMC HCI website for customer videos and more
• Live chat: Join Dell EMC President Chad Sakac and the HCI community beginning December 1st at 12:00 pm EST, to share ideas on #NextGenHCI in accelerating IT transformation to cloud operating models
• Find out more about how Dell Technologies is collaboratively solving customers' biggest challenges by visiting Dell Technologies' Annual Report to Customers
• Connect with Dell EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and DECN
• Follow the latest news on Twitter from @DellEMCNews

About Dell EMC

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data centers using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions. Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 – with the industry's most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

¹ Based on Dell EMC internal analysis, October 2017, comparing processor, memory, networking and storage for top HCI appliance vendors by revenue
² Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, Q2 2017, September 26, 2017
³ Based on Dell EMC internal analysis, October 2017, comparing a 13^th generation PowerEdge server configured with an Intel® Xeon E5-2600-V4 processor, compared to a 14^th generation PowerEdge server configured with an Intel® Xeon Scalable processor

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