The VP of Infrastructure was at her desk trying to make a decision. She needed to finalize the plan to refresh the company’s remote offices before the evening was through.
This project had more visibility than she was used to. While very few people have the impact on the business like she does, her colleagues usually take her and her team’s work for granted. They build “systems” that are composed of information technology, processes and people. Systems that run the business enable rapid decision-making, and IT innovation. The business runs without anyone necessarily knowing who is behind the systems they’re using. Unfortunately when something breaks they suddenly remember….
The good news is that for the past five years she diligently maintained a standard way to deploy systems so things don’t often break anymore. She was early to adopt virtualization and just as early to standardize her VMware infrastructure into modular building blocks her team designed and built.
The remote office project was different. Too often the remote offices made people think about her and her team. Each of the company’s 50 offices was a snowflake – they were all unique – each had slightly different configurations and capacities. And as a result they each require a significant amount of upkeep and remote attention from IT staff.
Vendors had lined up to pitch her the best storage, best server, best network, best converged infrastructure, best hyper converged infrastructure, best storage software, a private cloud solution, a public cloud solution, a hybrid cloud solution. Every offering was agile, transformative, innovative – one of them even called theirs invisible!
It shouldn’t be this complicated. She just needed new virtual infrastructure for her remote offices. One that took the guesswork out of the remote office deployments and one that did not require unique skillsets for each location. One that didn’t require her to abandon the VMware virtualization tools and processes that had allowed her enterprise colleagues to forget about her. At the same time the solution needed to have a low entry cost, predictable non-disruptive scaling, configured exactly as needed and purchased only when required.
With that in mind she started going through her options one more time, and realized that the list was shortened quickly until there was one left.
- “A turnkey, easily scalable appliance for the modern, innovation-focused data center or branch office”
- “Lets architects design standard solutions to add datacenter or remote office capacity”
- “Seamless integration with existing VMware tools and a platform to deploy the latest VMware solutions”
This solution seemed like it was designed with her requirements in mind. It would allow the remote office to be standardized, to not be a separate management silo — to not be snowflakes.
It was clear to her the VCE VxRail Appliances were the right solution for her. However, she thought, they don’t need to know that. Let’s call VCE and a few of others and have a bakeoff.
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Today, EMC and VMware jointly announced the VCE VxRail Appliance family developed with this and other stories from VPs of Infrastructure in mind. A key design goal is to provide standardization to parts of the infrastructure that lacked them, without creating siloes of management and processes.
VCE VxRail Appliances are the only integrated and jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure appliances for VMware environments. The VxRail Appliance family lets IT architects design standard solutions for virtualization and end-user computing that leverage and extend their existing IT tools and processes in departmental, regional and branch office deployments. VCE VxRail Appliances also provide a platform to deploy the latest VMware solutions, such as NSX and Horizon Air Hybrid Mode.
If you are VP of Infrastructure or you know one, and want to learn more about VxRail Appliances read the press release here. We were thinking of you when we developed this hyper-converged infrastructure appliance family.
