The importance of transforming IT to thrive in today’s digital economy was a key theme at VMworld 2018 that concluded last week. We are hand in glove with our customers in their IT transformation journey. Our high end storage portfolio of Dell PowerMax and XtremIO is helping customers to modernize their data centers, automate their IT processes and transform organizational dynamics. We saw several evidence of this IT transformation in our numerous customer interactions during breakout sessions, meetings and Solutions Exchange conversations at VMworld.
In his keynote, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger highlighted the needs of bridging across silos of innovation with the help of emerging tech super-powers of cloud, mobile, AI/ML, and IoT/edge. Powered by a built-in Machine Learning engine, PowerMax bridges the needs of traditional enterprise applications of today and real-time analytics-driven modern application workloads of tomorrow by automatically learning from the shifting workload patterns. This powerful, future-proof next-generation storage architecture delivers the quintessential high performance and extremely low latency required for these rapidly evolving mixed-workload environments in an end-to-end NVMe storage design.
Launched in early May, PowerMax is already making significant impact in our customers’ IT transformation journey. Rackspace, the world’s largest multi-cloud managed service provider, expects to empower their customers with cloud-like control in a multi-cloud managed environment, simplify their IT infrastructure management, gain efficiencies in power and cooling with a much reduced data center footprint, and vastly lower operational expense. Check out the discussions of Sean Wedige, CTO of Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace, and our rock-star VMworld presenter, Scott Delandy (@scottdelandy) here.
The other star of our high-end storage portfolio is XtremIO, the purpose-built all-flash array designed from the ground up to take advantage of the flash media. Its content-based addressing mechanism and 100% in-memory metadata architecture lead to excellent inline, all the time data reduction efficiencies coupled with industry’s unique integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) solutions. And the proof is in the pudding!
VMware IT’s Cloud Infrastructure team is leveraging XtremIO X2 for their virtualized SAP HANA environment. They tested cloning a 2TB VM on traditional storage – it took 2.5 hours. In contrast, XtremIO X2 performed the same cloning task in 90 seconds! VMware IT meets their 140TB of SAP HANA storage capacity requirement with only 40TB of physical capacity from XtremIO X2 – a 3.5:1.0 data reduction ration. Their 1.2PB of ESXi production storage capacity requirement can be met with 280TB of XtremIO X2 physical storage. To put that in perspective, VMware’s 3 rows of storage footprint can be reduced to 3 racks of storage, and they can enjoy significant power and cooling as well as OpEx savings. VMware’s Kandy O’Mara discusses the benefits they are seeing is this video.
Dell CloudIQ, a key part of the Dell Cloud Marketplace announcement at VMworld, is like a fitness tracker for your storage environment. With this cloud-based storage analytics system, you can get access to the status of your PowerMax and XtremIO systems from wherever you are and whenever you need it. With the Dell Future-Proof Loyalty Program, you get peace of mind with no hidden costs or fees, invest protection lowering the risk of your investment, and most importantly, a path forward to your digital world fueled by modern IT infrastructure future.
So how does the world of PowerMax, XtremIO, CloudIQ and Future-Proof fit together in your VMware-powered IT environment? Check out my interview with theCUBE at VMworld.
