The Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud has previously been available on VxBlock, but it will soon be available on VxRail appliances, broadening its presence down market and greatly increasing the channel opportunity.

Today, Dell EMC is announcing the Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud [EHC] on Dell EMC VxRail Appliances. EHC had already been available on the company’s VxBlock converged offering and on VxRack FLEX. Its extension now to the newer, smaller VxRail appliances should significantly expand its total addressable market. It should also significantly expand the channel opportunity.

EHC is a fully designed, integrated and tested engineered solution designed to deliver much greater time to value than an IT organization building their own hybrid cloud infrastructure.

“Customers are increasingly moving to the hybrid cloud, but are challenged in responding to what they see in the market with born-in-the-cloud startups and new business models,” said Kevin Gray, director of product marketing, Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud Platforms. “EHC provides a private cloud solution that is understood by the market, and expanding its platform presence onto VxRail appliances will increase its market presence.”

“We have been trying to broaden out applications for hyper-converged over the past years, to expand it beyond traditional applications like VDI and extend it into the mainstream,” said Colin Gallagher, senior director of product marketing, Dell EMC VxRail. “Even we were surprised by the demand there, however. According to IDC, our hyper-converged portfolio grew at twice the rate as the whole hyper-converged market.”

Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, introduced exactly a year ago to extend the EMC hyper-converged portfolio into smaller enterprises and the mid-market, have done well – in happy contrast to VSPEX Blue, the company’s short-lived predecessor in this space. More than 1,000 customers have purchased in excess of 8,000 VxRail nodes – exceeding 65 petabytes of storage and 100,000 cores – in the year since VxRail hit the market.

“We have had EHC available on the VxBlock platform for approximately two years,” Gray said. “VxBlock is, however, best suited for large global customers. For the midmarket, and for partners, we didn’t have it on a platform well suited for those, until now.”

Gray said that the sweet spot for EHC on VxRail starts at about 200 VMs.

“If they are smaller and only doing a few VMs, it can make more sense to do the provisioning manually,” he said. “Between 200 and 1000 VMs is a particularly good candidate for this,” he said. “On VxBlock, anything under 500 VMs wouldn’t have been a good starting point.”

Ease of deployment and operation is the solution’s strongest selling feature.

“We find that our best customers for EHC are the ones who have tried to build it on their own, and failed,” Gray said. “The installation process is automated, which is important for partners as well as for customers. We have also introduced a subscription support model with professional services, so there is one-call support for the entire platform.”

Dell EMC expects the new offering will be especially popular as a channel solution.

“Customers are starting to face that need of a cloud-like operating model, but the majority prefer the flexibility of a hybrid solution,” Gray said. “From a partner perspective, the added ability to deliver that as a turnkey solution makes it ideal. It would be accurate to call this a turnkey hybrid cloud in a box.”

Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud with Dell EMC VxRail Appliances is scheduled for general availability on March 31, 2017.