EMC World 2015: VCE unveils VxRack for mobile and cloud apps

EMC's virtualisation division, VCE, has launched a new range of "hyper-converged" rack-scale systems, known as VxRack.

Unveiled at EMC World in Las Vegas, VxRack allows enterprises and service providers to better manage deployment of mobile and cloud apps.

The new system uses EMC's ScaleIO software-defined storage, VMware vRealize management and orchestration suite and Cisco top-of-rack Nexus switching.

VCE claims the VxRack product allows users to start off with dozens of servers, but scale to thousands with up to 38 petabytes of storage capacity while delivering high performance/value per IOP.

The systems use VCE's infrastructure with single call lifecycle support, which it claims will help improve the customer's experience for the system.

It offers customers a choice of hypervisors to use, such as VMware vSphere, KVM or bare metal using ScaleIO software defined storage.

Future systems will be tailored for VMware environments, offering a fully integrated VMware stack based on VMware's EVO:RACK converged system technology and VMware Virtual SAN.

According to Praveen Akkiraju, chief executive of VCE, this version sporting EVO:RACK will come out in August.

Akkiraju said in a keynote that the system was very flexible.

"This is built on hyperconverged building blocks, you can get a compute intensive node, a storage intensive node and mix and match all these in the racks," he said.

"Customers can have quarter racks, half racks, full racks. You could even build out to thousands of racks it really scales out."

He added that networking was as flexible as the compute and storage nodes. "You can't really scale up unless networking is built in."

He said the best use case for the system were tier two workloads that could take advantage of hyperconverged systems. "Tier one workloads such as an ERP system would run on a vBlock," he said.

The system starts shipping in the third quarter of this year.