Why not vblock

Web-scale IT, including commodity servers, local storage and some variation of a distributed file system, has become the de facto standard in this very demanding space.

The low cost, resiliency, simplicity and scalability of the web-scale architecture ensure that it will also become the standard of the modern virtualized datacenter. Although most enterprise, and even government, datacenters are not as large as those of the leading cloud providers, they often receive even greater benefit from Web-Scale converged infrastructure.

This is due to their much greater number of applications, the majority of which tend to be off-the-shelf. Conventional three-tier architecture is infrastructure-centric rather than VM-centric.

The storage subsystem has no virtual machine awareness and no insight into the number or configuration of disparate workloads residing on them. The architecture utilizes Virtual Machines, rather than LUNs, as the primary building block of the datacenter. Policies traditionally defined at the storage pool or LUN level can now be applied at the individual virtual machine level — where they make sense, resolving the application and service disruption issues and enabling both analytics and replication capabilities at a very granular virtual machine level.

Simplicity is just one of the claims commonly made by VCE that Nutanix actually fulfills. Another is time-to-deployment. VCE boasts that it only takes 40 days to procure and stand-up a Vblock. Nutanix installs in hours, and can be procured in less than a week. And not only is Nutanix much less expensive to procure and scale, but it also is much less expensive and complex to operate.

Web-Scale also enables a vastly less complex and more elegant approach to hosting virtualized infrastructure than packaging servers, even UCS servers, with storage arrays. For example, since the virtualization administrators manage the entire environment, there is no need for collaboration between server and storage teams.

Enterprises and governments around the world are embracing Web-Scale IT. Nutanix is now the fastest-growing infrastructure company of the past three decades. To learn more about web-scale, check out the industry-wide online event that Nutanix is hosting live on June 25, Web-Scale Wednesday. EMC IT set a bold goal of percent virtualization on Intel architecture see this post and others for more on why.

Would I want to use it in my data centers? Can I use it to get to a Private Cloud infrastructure? We designed Vblock to provide an answer to these questions. Vblock is not, however, the only choice for fully virtualized environments—or for building Private Clouds. You can get to your destination multiple ways, using different combinations of technologies.

Vblock is a reference architecture. Multiple P. As long as they are verified as part of a Vblock reference architecture, you can buy all the individual piece-parts, and still have your Vblocks supported with a single point of contact. Single P. A Build-Operate-Transfer service. The company has assured that they have not, and will not forget the product. Existing Vblock customers are supported for the full service life. The company will continue to sell additional Vblock System expansions e.

Dell EMC will also continue to offer service and security patches through June 30, Product, organizational growth, manufacturing, and support maturity, in addition to thousands of real-world deployments, have enabled VCE to be tremendously more flexible in deployment and support of many configurations today.

Chassis supports eight half-width blades, and a single Fabric Interconnect pair can support up to 16 chassis or blades. C-Series extensions are connected to VBs, s, and s to fabric interconnects, meaning that server management is centralized along with the blades in the Vblocks.

Storage Array s and s use the VNX series array, which ranges from to drives, depending on the model. Orders of magnitude improvements in performance over the VNX line, along with terrific dedup ratios for dedup friendly workloads, make this the default array by many customers who are considering purchasing a Vblock.

Although EMC has faced criticism for rushing this platform to the market before all of its enterprise features were ready, this is still the primary choice for enterprise applications that require the highest uptime. Additional storage switches can be added for special use cases, such as to provide connectivity to iseries servers. Note that Vblock does not allow Layer 3 configurations on these, but instead requires that layer 3 services be provided by northbound switches outside of the Vblock.

NX-OS has to be made before workloads are added to the Vblock. In general, software-defined networking is a very new concept, and with the marketplace dynamics being unsure, we have not seen any SDN factory deployments to date.

An additional pair of Cisco Nexus Switches provides out of band management. Hypervisor Compatibility Vblocks officially support VMware vSphere and VCE can provide single call support from the hardware all the way up through this hypervisor. The solution enables an organization to review the health of all major Vblock hardware components.