ESG White Paper: VxRack FLEX on 14th Generation PowerEdge ...

1 This ESG Lab Review was commissioned by dell EMC and is distributed under license from ESG. 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Background Hyperconverged offerings have enabled organizations to modernize their infrastructures and deliver a cloud-like experience on-premises. In fact, the adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure has more than doubled over the last year and there are no signs of slowing Simplified, flexible deployment options that are easily managed and easily scaled are just a few of the factors driving the rapid adoption of hyperconverged technology. Consolidation and modernization efforts are top of mind for organizations, and hyperconverged offerings allow IT to meet the needs of the business while satisfying existing and future application SLAs related to performance, scalability, reliability, and cost. Organizations requirements often dictate supporting enterprise applications and databases of different shapes and sizes, across multiple hypervisors and operating systems, on both physical and virtual infrastructure.

2 All of these configurations and architectures must be taken into consideration when planning and expanding the adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure in the data center. Even if they currently rely on hyperconverged solutions to modernize their IT infrastructures, organizations might find that performance is not always optimized for workloads. Predictable scalability can be tricky to deliver, and management of the entire stack can quickly become overwhelming. VxRack FLEX with 14th Generation PowerEdge Servers VxRack System FLEX ( VxRack FLEX) is a rack-based hyperconverged solution that delivers flexible, scalable, and performant software-defined storage. VxRack FLEX enables IT organizations to work with one vendor to supply all the software, hardware, and support required to modernize their data centers. Key to the solution is the scale-out architecture, offering organizations flexibility to start small and grow based on their needs.

3 Further, this elasticity delivers on the hyperconverged promise of cloud-like scale and flexibility on-premises. While many other hyperconverged offerings disregard networking altogether, VxRack FLEX supports both physical and virtual networking and includes top of rack switches that control network traffic, management, and redundancy. Put it all together and organizations get a hyperconverged solution that can easily be used with all other dell EMC products and services to deliver impressive performance and protection at scale. By integrating the latest dell 14th Generation PowerEdge servers, VxRack FLEX has been optimized to handle HCI-specific workloads and offer greater performance than ever before. The latest Generation of PowerEdge servers was purpose-built for HCI, containing 150 custom requirements for SDS built-in to the solution. Leveraging a software-defined storage approach to satisfy enterprise application and database block storage requirements enables organizations to potentially break free of large initial investments and high operational costs commonly associated with traditional SANs.

4 The proven VxRack FLEX platform delivers even greater density and value with HCI-optimized PowerEdge servers and provides customers with more consistent performance at scale. 1 Source: ESG Research Report, The Cloud Computing Spectrum: From Private to Hybrid, March 2016; and ESG Master Survey Results, Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure Trends, October 2017. Lab Report Preview dell EMC VxRack FLEX on 14th Generation PowerEdge Servers Dom Amato, Associate Lab Analyst | Aviv Kaufmann, Senior Lab Analyst Enterprise Strategy Group | Getting to the bigger truth. Lab Validation Report Preview: dell EMC VxRack FLEX on 14th Generation PowerEdge Servers 2 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 2018 by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ESG Lab Validation ESG Lab is currently evaluating the benefits that dell EMC s VxRack FLEX delivers to organizations.

5 ESG Lab has already validated performance at scale and several specialized use cases of VxRack FLEX ranging from the advantages over traditional database deployments to cloud enablement. ESG reviewed the latest offering of VxRack FLEX with purpose-built 14th Generation PowerEdge servers with a focus on how its powerful performance, multi-purpose functionality, and seamless management improve upon the capabilities of traditional HCI systems. ESG plans to release a full detailed validation report in the coming months. Validation Highlights By designing the 14th Generation PowerEdge servers with scalability top of mind, VxRack FLEX is able to unlock its true potential, giving customers improved density, performance, and flexibility with simplified and predictable scalability. The latest Generation of VxRack FLEX allows organizations to do more with less hardware while delivering predictable bandwidth and latency for all workloads, while lowering the total cost of ownership of the HCI solution.

6 The addition of new PowerEdge servers simply offers more powerful building blocks for VxRack FLEX solutions. Customers will now have the benefit of a VxRack system that delivers more IOPS and bandwidth per node with up to 20% more cores and 400% more memory than previous models. The additional cores and memory mean greater VM density on each node, making VxRack FLEX a viable solution for almost any combination of workloads. Customers can optimize their system with customized node configurations that best fit their infrastructure requirements; including compute only, storage only, an HCI-balanced combination, and even nodes containing up to 3 GPUs for specialized applications. VxRack FLEX comes pre-integrated and pre-tested to the dell EMC standard and IT administrators can opt to take advantage of optimized BIOS and management settings for their configuration to save time at deployment. 14th Generation PowerEdge servers enable enhanced functionality, providing for quick and easy updates and addition of nodes, while eliminating some of the larger headaches that come with traditional HCI offerings.

7 VM migration is up to 58% faster and database applications can achieve almost 10x more throughput than they would have on previous Generation servers, freeing up valuable administrative time, infrastructure resources, and budget that would usually be spent maintaining and upgrading other offerings. The Bigger Truth Organizations are turning to hyperconverged solutions as building blocks to modernize their infrastructures and to satisfy the requirements of larger, more complex workloads. Unfortunately, many hyperconverged options are built upon commodity server technology that is not optimized for the platform. These HCI solutions can be inefficient, with limited scalability, resulting in increased costs to deploy, upgrade, tune, and customize them. ESG Lab is currently validating VxRack FLEX s newest offering built upon 14th Generation PowerEdge servers that were purpose-built for HCI. ESG is impressed so far with the results, as the new VxRack FLEX nodes deliver higher performance, greater density, and greater scalability, resulting in a smaller, more powerful HCI solution that helps minimize both capital and operational costs.

8 Look for the full report in the coming weeks!