The numbers don’t lie. Sixty percent of Dell VxRack FLEX customers make a second purchase within 180 days. And these are big customers – Fortune 500 companies that have resources, do their research and select proven and competitive solutions after going through rigorous bids and POCs. This tells us that our rack-scale hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system delivers on its promise and VxRack FLEX is on an upwards trajectory with no signs of slowing down.
Launched in 2015, VxRack FLEX offers a turnkey experience that includes delivery and support of a single solution managed holistically. Under the covers, it includes world-class compute, storage and integrated networking for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments. With VxRack FLEX’s simplicity of deployment and ongoing management, an analyst report found that VxRack FLEX offers 6x faster time-to-value and 30 percent lower TCO compared to a traditional SAN.
VxRack FLEX enables massive scale-out capabilities for the data center along with flexible deployment options (compute and storage residing on the same server or separated out). Add nodes one by one within a single rack or scale out with additional racks as compute and storage resources are consumed. This provides your infrastructure with elastic sizing and efficient scalability, allowing you to start small with your proof of concept and grow to web-scale size as your requirements evolve. Because VxRack FLEX supports diverse environments, it is ideal for consolidating both traditional and modern applications that demand high performance, availability, and resiliency onto a single system.
There have been a number of important enhancements to VxRack FLEX already this year. Available this month, VxRack FLEX is integrated with the latest 14th Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers. This next generation system means more powerful handling of workloads, greater capacity, and improved flexibility:
- 5x more IOPS per node
- 60 percent more flash capacity per node
- 4x more memory
- 34 percent more virtual machines per node
- 250 percent more bandwidth
Dell PowerEdge 14th generation servers are designed specifically for and tailored to HCI workloads that depend on the tenets of both servers and storage. This enables us to offer customers enhanced storage capacity and flexibility, allowing customers to optimize their storage configurations for their hyper-converged environment. These servers enable VxRack FLEX to deliver significantly faster access to applications and data thanks to higher core counts, faster clock frequency, more memory channels, and faster memory.
Also new this month are enhanced monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities – a huge priority for our customers running mission-critical applications because it allows for greater agility and control of server resources. These new features mean failures are quickly identified and Dell Support is informed immediately for speedy resolutions. Proactive alerting and automated technical support means less time is spent troubleshooting so more time can be spent addressing business priorities.
If you’ll be at Dell Technologies World this year, be sure to join our breakout sessions to get a deeper dive on our architecture, use cases and workloads:
- VxRack FLEX: Introduction & What’s New
- VxRack FLEX: Running Mission-Critical Enterprise Applications on HCI
- VxRack FLEX: Architecture Overview
- VxRack FLEX: Achieving the Best Performance & Availability
If you can’t be there in person, check out some of our recent white papers:
- Wikibon White Paper: VxRack FLEX Business Value Findings
- IDC Integrated Networking White Paper
- Splunk on VxRack FLEX for Machine Data Analytics Paper
- ESG Technical White Paper: Running Traditional Databases on VxRack FLEX
- ESG White Paper: Modernizing Virtual Infrastructures using VxRack FLEX
- ESG White Paper: Enabling Enterprise Cloud Adoption with VxRack FLEX
VxRack FLEX has had tremendous momentum coming out of 2017 and with these exciting new releases happening in Q1 and Q2 we expect nothing but acceleration and growth. Reach out to us at any time to discuss the best HCI approach to meet your needs!
