Grab your hover board and power on your flux capacitor—we’re going back in time. The date is February 16, 2016. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) didn’t know it yet, but she was in for a wild day. HCI’s morning started routine enough… she woke up to find a handful of friend requests from start-ups. Several established players liked a pic she had just posted. And her latest blog was getting tons of shares (especially from analysts). But this type of thing didn’t get her HDDs spinning… HCI was fairly used to being the center of attention.
Then everything changed… Her phone buzzed as someone tweeted to her:
@Dell launches #VxRail Appliances; sets new standard for #hyperconverged. Jointly developed, optimized, and built with @VMware.
HCI set down her coffee and surfed over to Dell’s page to see what all the fuss was about. It was a huge announcement, and everyone she knew was commenting about VxRail. “…creates certainty for customers; leverages a proven building block powered by vSAN; customers can continuously modernize; it’s a simple, agile way to scale on demand; leverages existing tools and processes…”
It was new. It was transformative. And one thing was clear. VxRail was about to change everything. HCI then did something that she had never done before. She sent her first friend request.
And…. we’re back. Today is February 16, 2017 and one year has passed. From the moment we launched VxRail, we knew it was going to be big. But even we were surprised by its out of the gates success—more than 8,000 nodes sold to over 1,000 customers in more than 70 countries—all in the first year!
Even more exciting is that when the dust settles on end-of-year industry numbers, we believe VxRail is the most rapidly adopted HCI appliance ever, and that Dell will be the market leader for hyper-converged.
More organizations than ever (over 60% of them) are looking to deploy HCI, if they haven’t already.1 Without question, many of them are choosing VxRail. In fact, with the addition of VxRail in 2016, the Dell HCI portfolio outgrew one of the fastest growing IT markets by more 2x, and now represents more than a quarter of all hyper-converged systems sold.2
We see customers that span across industries deploying VxRail for more and more use cases within the data center. Notably, this includes enterprise applications, which aligns to industry research that shows three out of four organizations are already deploying HCI in the core.1
So what’s next? I’m glad you asked…
Hybrid cloud is fast becoming the new operating model for most IT departments. Sure, transient workloads will continue to benefit from the elastic economics offered by the public cloud. But for long-lasting on-premises workloads, VxRail delivers enterprise performance and ease of manageability at half the total cost of ownership versus leveraging the public cloud.3
Today, in addition to celebrating VxRail’s first birthday, we are thrilled to announce Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) on VxRail Appliances . This turnkey hybrid cloud platform helps organizations start small and grow on their journey to transform IT. With EHC on VxRail, customers with smaller deployments can now enjoy the same benefits as larger enterprises—automation, self-service, freeing up resources, minimizing costs, and reducing risk.
For more information about this announcement, read the Press Release.
Accomplishments of this magnitude are only possible through collaboration. In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to say “thank you” 30,000 times. In each of the 1,000+ companies who invested in VxRail this past year, there were about 10 stakeholders who contributed to that decision. And each VxRail order was further supported by 20 individuals within Dell and our partner organizations. So that is 30,000 people I need to thank.
Thank you for joining me in this journey. I look forward to what we will create together in 2017 and beyond.
