The enhancements unveiled stress simplification and improved performance.
Dell Technologies is expanding its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. As part of the upgrade, it is adding an option for users to incorporate external third-party storage.
Nancy Hurley, senior manager of program management for Dell’s HCI/CI products, commented. The main aim of the upgrade is to “simplify operations and deployment from day zero through day two,” she said. “The big news is self-deployment.”
Dell claims their VxRail is the only HCI system that was jointly engineered with VMware for VMware environments. The VxRail product line was the market share leader in the fourth quarter of 2020. It also accounted for nearly one-third of industry-wide HCI revenues, according to International Data Corp.
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Delivering greater efficiency by empowering the user
Dell aims to empower users through a series of system software enhancements that give customers greater control over installation. They do this with self-service tools to validate, orchestrate and automate cluster deployment on their own schedule.
The company announced other new software capabilities that allow users to redeploy or reallocate nodes dynamically for better utilization and performance. Hurley continued, saying that continuously validated states “ensure that clusters are always ready and always ready for the next upgrade.” That’s done through a compatibility matrix and ecosystem connectors that enable Dell “to ensure that any time you have an upgrade you’re in a continually validated state,” she said.
“We perform over 25,000 hours of tests on all the different components to be sure that if you are doing upgrades everything has been tested and sequenced. You can truly just push a button and upgrade.” The result is a “fully curated experience,” she said. “There’s automatic detection and it takes five minutes to add a new node into a cluster.”
Lifecycle management features in the system software also enable older clusters to be integrated with new ones with automatic recognition of firmware and software. “It’s pushbutton lifecycle management regardless of the generation of the node,” Hurley said. The self-deployment options will be available in North America through an early access program beginning in August.
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