Dell also announces its first AMD-powered VxRail offering, as well as some new capabilities based on the most recent announcements to the VxRail HCI System software.
VxRail D Series
Today, Dell Technologies is announcing two new new VxRail hardware platforms. One is the ruggedized VxRail D Series, a small form factor system aimed principally at harsher edge environments. The other is the VxRail E Series, the first VxRail HCI offering to feature the new 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, code-named Rome.
“75% of enterprise data will be created and processed outside traditional datacentres or the cloud by 2022,” said Shannon Champion, Director Product marketing at Dell Technologies. “We are taking HCI to extremes across edge, core and cloud, in a breadth of platform configurations.”
Champion described the new ruggedized VxRail D Series as the most Extreme VxRail series yet.
“D is for Durable,” she said. “It is designed for edge, harsh, or space constrained environments. It’s lightweight and easily portable, with a low 20-inch rack depth, our smallest form factor, smaller than the E series.”
The temperature resilience is designed for harsh environments, from 15 c to 45c in permanent conditions, and able to go up to 55c for up to 8 hours. It can also sustain 40G of operational shock and operate at up to 15,000 feet.
“We see this fitting into manufacturing and oil and gas environments,” Champion said. “The ruggedized nature makes it attractive to the military. We already have traction and interest there as well. Whether for data centre modernization, extending the edge, or working in harsh environments, it will deliver a turnkey experience.”
VxRail E Series
The VxRail D Series features 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors – not the 3rd Gen ones which just became available last week. The other hardware announcement, the VxRail E Series, is a departure for Dell in the HCI space in that for the first time, it is powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, code-named Rome. The new VxRail E665 systemis available in NVMe, all-flash, or hybrid storage configurations. These single socket servers have up to 64 high performance cores and support for PCIe 4, and are targeted broadly at database, unstructured data, virtual desktop infrastructure and HPC workloads.
Champion noted that the most recent release of VxRail’s system software facilitates new capabilities in these and other VxRail systems.
“They enable us to enhance the native VMware experience for extreme operational simplicity,” she said. “It adds new upgrade health checks to run on demand , which is important if they have structured windows. It also offers more flexibility in getting all nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version.”
The software upgrades also allow VxRail to add support for Intel Optane Persistent memory and NVIDIA GPU options. The Intel Optane Persistent Memory support maintains data integrity even when power is lost, for quicker recovery and less downtime. Support for NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs facilitate accelerated rendering, AI, and advanced graphics and compute to the data center for more complex graphics rendering over a wide range of workflows.
“These are both new options for the VxRail portfolio,” Champion stated.
Both the VxRail D Series with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and the VxRail E Series with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors will be available tomorrow, June 23, 2020. All the software capabilities are available now.
