VxRail vs [SDN + SDS]

Converged solutions are proven to significantly speed deployments, make infrastructure more agile, and simplify operations. VCE converged products fall into one of three distinct segments: Blocks, Racks, and Appliances.

Blocks are traditional converged infrastructure, which is an engineered system that leverages enterprise storage arrays, traditional storage area networks (SANs), and typically blade-based compute systems—all manufactured into a single product. VCE Block family includes Vblock Systems and VxBlock Systems.

Racks represent a new category of hyper-converged infrastructure. Racks offer an architecture that is not based on a traditional, physical SAN and they do not include enterprise storage arrays. Instead, they are built using industry-standard server platforms running what is called software-defined storage. Because there is no physical SAN and no storage array, these engineered systems enable customers to grow to data-center scale in flexible discrete increments. These self-contained units of servers, networking, and management software are well suited for the rapid growth in next-generation applications—allowing customers to support a growing number of use cases with built-in resiliency and less stringent availability and performance requirements on infrastructure. VCE VxRack System 1000 series offers two software-defined storage technologies, a choice of hypervisors, and bare-metal workloads.

VxRail Appliances are purpose built for departmental and edge applications as well as small enterprise and mid-market data centers. Like VxRack Systems they do not contain a storage array, but instead run a software-defined storage environment on the appliance. They are built using standard x86 hardware, and tend to focus on ease of use and use case specific features. VxRail Appliances scale from 4 to 64 nodes.