Discover what’s next in converged infrastructure (CI)
There’s no better time than now to discover the business value of CI. “Converged infrastructure is engineered to lower IT operations risk and improve IT efficiency. That leads to better time-to-value and infrastructure agility for business applications,” says Peter Burris, Chief Research Officer and General Manager of Wikibon.
With Dell VxBlock, enterprises around the world enjoy the simplicity of a turnkey system that’s engineered, manufactured, managed, supported and life-cycle sustained as a single product. “With VxBlock, you can set it and forget it. It has improved our processing time and is reliable, so we rarely have to monitor it,” says Ryan Deppe, Network Operations Supervisor, Cianbro, one of the largest employee-owned U.S. construction and construction services companies.
2018 has been a watershed year for Dell CI innovation, beginning with the introduction of the next-generation, all-in-one VxBlock System 1000. Today we’re announcing some exciting new automation and cloud operations capabilities as the innovation and value keep flowing.
I’m pleased to share the news along with perspectives from our customers, the industry analyst community and Dell Technologies partner VMware. VxBlock is now a Dell Integrated Cloud Platform, providing the optimal CI platform for your VMware-based cloud.
Simpler administration: Converged awareness, automation, analytics
“Dell VxBlock has the added value of built-in management and automation software to provide a baseline cloud experience, making True Private Cloud more practical than ever before,” says Wikibon Chief Research Officer Burris.
Available beginning in early December, Dell VxBlock Central software provides a single user interface for CI administration—with launch points to VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) for automating daily operational tasks such as expansion of compute resources, and to vRealize Operations (vROPs) for deep VxBlock analytics and simplified capacity management.
Dell VxBlock Central
Dell customers look forward to significant new business value:
- “The new real-time alerts from VxBlock Central and integration with vRealize are huge, making it easier to get information than before.” – Ryan Deppe, Network Operations Supervisor, Cianbro
- “Based on its capabilities, I expect that VxBlock Central’s converged infrastructure workflows and analytics will give IT shops back even more time for strategic initiatives.” – John Grieco, CTO, The University of Vermont Health Network
- “We are a growing business, and having the new automation from VxBlock Central integrated with vRealize in my back pocket means that I can quickly expand the VxBlock when my management asks for it.” – Ryan Deppe, Network Operations Supervisor, Cianbro
Faster path to cloud operations: VMware vRealize integration
Enterprises worldwide run their VMware-based clouds on VxBlock Systems. This is no surprise, when you consider they incorporate VMware vSphere virtualization, as well as a choice of storage arrays that provide the required levels of performance, availability and data services.
Now, Dell and VMware are introducing an even faster path to cloud operations on CI. “Dell VxBlock Central software’s integration with VMware’s vRealize Suite leverages its latest innovations to make consuming, delivering and supporting private cloud on converged infrastructure easier than ever,” says Ajay Singh, SVP and GM, Cloud Management, VMware.
The latest vRealize innovations bring important benefits for private cloud teams and their LOB/developer consumers. New integrations between vRealize Automation (vRA) and vRealize Operations (vROPs) help to enhance the “out of the box” capabilities of VxBlock Systems and VxBlock Central software for intelligent, automated private cloud service life cycle management. For example:
- Developing cloud architecture design blueprints in vRA that take advantage of the feature-rich VxBlock resource pools.
- Deploying and optimizing workloads based on the state of infrastructure – with VROPs and VxBlock Central providing “converged understanding” up through vRA.
“vRealize takes advantage of VxBlock 1000 system’s wide range of technologies to create scalable and robust cloud services,” adds Singh.
According to Wikibon analyst Burris, “VxBlock 1000 with VxBlock Central and VMware vRealize is a strong solution choice for bringing the cloud to high-value, high-performance applications.”
The enhanced integration of VxBlock Central with vRealize also means enterprises can now extend a familiar, consistent vRealize user experience across a full range of Dell converged and hyper-converged systems.
Learn more about Dell innovation in CI
We invite you to learn more about these converged management, automation and cloud operations innovations by viewing the online launch event hosted by Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman, featuring Dell and VMware experts along with VxBlock customer Cianbro.
While at VMworld 2018 Europe, visit Dell Technologies booth #D401 Nov. 6-8 to speak with our CI specialists, see the VxBlock and get a close-up look at the rich functionality of VxBlock Central through an interactive demo.
As always, more innovations are on the way for VxBlock — including a growing range of additional provisioning workflows that we will be providing through our VxBlock Central Orchestration offering. We’ll keep you in the know as they’re released!
