The new nodes equip VxRack to support OpenStack, and by next year, will support Hadoop and the VMware Photon Platform as well. They also have the effect of being able to turn Pivotal Cloud Foundry into an end-to-end solution for developers.

LAS VEGAS – Today at EMC World, EMC announced it has added a turnkey cloud-native Infrastructure-as-a-service experience to their VCE VxRack System through new Neutrino Nodes. This will significantly strengthen VxRack in cloud-native services, initially in OpenStack, and by next-year, in VMware Photon Platform, and Apache Hadoop. It will also strengthen partners’ portfolios by adding to the flexibility of solutions they can offer.

EMC initially introduced the VxRack a year ago at last year’s EMC World. Designed to combine the simplicity of an appliance with the scalability required for the data centre, it has good success n itss first year on the market.

“The predominant portion of VCE’s business has been vBlocks, but this has been popular among service providers and globals who wanted massive scalability,” said Todd Pavone, VCE’s Chief Operating Officer. “The VxRack gave them the same experience as with a vBlock, but hyper-converged for massive scale.”

Notwithstanding the size of the customer, this has basically been a channel business, as is the cast with the majority of VCE sales.

“All of the deals we have done with VxRack are with partners,” Pavone said.

The Neutrino Nodes extend VxRack to cloud-native services including OpenStack, VMware Photon Platform, and Apache Hadoop.

“They are specifically built for these applications developed by native hybrid clouds, and allow you to have an Infrastructure-as-a-Service for them,” Pavone said.

They also have the advantage of being relatively quick to deploy and simple to manage. Four nodes can be deployed in 20 minutes – and while a typical solution might scale to hundreds of nodes, they are capable of starting small.

“Neutrino Nodes also address a significant pain point of OpenStack – that it can be difficult to manage,” said Colin Davitian, Senior Director of Product Management at EMC. “This is very easy to update and expand, with a single update mechanism.”

Simplicity has typically been undervalued by vendors in the OpenStack market, Davitian added.

“We think a lot of vendors have talked to the wrong people, to OpenStack technical guys. Developers don’t want complex things. They want tools that are simple to use.”

“When we announced the FLEX nodes last year, the first question was ‘When will you have this for OpenStack, and here we are today,” Pavano said. “That’s why we did OpenStack first, because the demand was there. Today, you need to be able to support the apps of both today and tomorrow. That’s the way the industry is going. The whole idea with Neutrino was to provide this type of flexibility. You can also take Pivotal Cloud Foundry, integrate it with these and have a complete end-to-end solution for developers that can be deployed the same way.”

This flexibility greatly assists partners, Pavano said.

“It gives them more options. Partners are most successful when they have flexible solutions they can offer.”

EMC now provides the ability to map the VxRack System to specific application environments through three software-defined nodes – Neutrino Nodes, FLEX Nodes, which leverage EMC ScaleIO, and VMware SDDC Nodes. Nodes are optimized for their workloads and are tightly integrated with the VxRack System architecture for a pre-configured hyper-converged system with automated provisioning, simplified management and robust reporting capabilities.

“There is not a lot of configurability, which some people may not like, but for most, this is more than offset by the turnkey nature,” Davitian said.

VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes support for OpenStack is orderable now, and available in Q3 2016. VxRack System with Neutrino Nodes support for Photon Platform and Hadoop Apache will be available next year.