Dell Expands Industry Leading HCI Portfolio With XC Core

Five short years ago, Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) was a disruptive technology, and today it’s become a mainstream IT solution for all virtualized workloads. Customer adoption and year-over-year demand growth – estimated at 60% in 2018 – are evidence this trend is undeniably real and will continue.

As the leading HCI system sales vendor, according to IDC, Dell has played a primary role in enabling and supporting this transition, and our goal is to offer a broad set of approaches that deliver the best fit for customers’ unique needs. One example of this is our XC Series, the best platform for those customers who have committed to Nutanix software.

We are continuing to expand the XC Family, and today we are announcing XC Core, a new offering that provides customers with an additional way to acquire Nutanix software licensing while leveraging the benefits of the Dell XC platform. XC Core, available today, uses the same Dell hardware and software as the XC Series appliances while the software is licensed and supported directly by Nutanix. This alternative lets customers buy Nutanix software licenses directly from authorized partners, and then add the licenses to pre-validated XC Core systems that are configured, built and tested by Dell. It also enables license portability across infrastructure components and separate management and support of hardware and software lifecycles.

The XC Family – comprising XC Series appliances, XC Xpress appliances and now XC Core – is arguably the most complete and robust platform for customers deploying HCI with Nutanix software. Here’s why:

1. The XC platform is based on industry-leading and proven Dell PowerEdge servers that are configured and optimized for HCI and Nutanix software. These latest 14^th generation PowerEdge servers were built with more than 150 custom requirements specifically for software-defined storage (SDS).
2. PowerEdge server BIOS and firmware for the XC Family are tuned and optimized for performance to run Nutanix software.
3. The XC platform includes Dell IP that enables streamlined deployment, rapid restore to factory settings and bare metal recovery, rich in-band hardware monitoring and management, 1-click firmware and software upgrades, and workflow orchestration across a cluster.
4. Customers can choose the Nutanix licensing and support model that is best for their needs while still leveraging the benefits of the XC platform.
5. The XC Family comes with an ecosystem that includes reference architectures, network validation tools and integration with other Dell and Microsoft technologies, including Pivotal, Avamar, Data Domain and Azure.
6. Customers can rely on global service and support that includes support centers and teams in 167 countries, over a thousand spare parts depots around the world, and technical experts fluent in 55 languages.

Dell’s HCI leadership is based on building a world class portfolio of industry-leading technologies and solutions to address essentially any adoption model for consuming HCI. Working with customers around the world, we know there’s no single way—no silver bullet—to address every opportunity or challenge. Customers know they can turn to Dell to find the solution that makes the most sense for their own unique requirements.

Based on our industry leading portfolio, we’re excited to offer yet another onramp to Dell and our proven technologies and support. As customers increasingly turn to HCI, we look forward to continuing to offer them the industry’s best options to simplify and transform their IT.