EMC announces VSPEX BLUE: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

EMC Corporation announced availability of VSPEX BLUE, its hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) to India market.  VSPEX BLUE is  a next-generation converged infrastructure product that redefines simplicity by delivering virtualization, compute, and storage in an agile, scalable, easy-to-manage, HCIA. Available as a single, all-inclusive product for easy ordering, EMC VPEX BLUE accelerates time to market by enabling customers to go from power-on to virtual machine creation within 15 minutes.

Designed for simplicity, fully orchestrated installation, management, patching, and upgrading, EMC VSPEX BLUE provides linear scaling capability that grows based on business needs. A single point of hardware and software support by EMC assures customers of 24x7 support and repair service at their fingertips. EMC VSPEX BLUE offers midmarket and enterprise customers the fastest, lowest-risk path to the private/hybrid cloud. The EMC VSPEX BLUE architecture is a distributed system consisting of common modular building blocks that scale linearly from one to four 2U/4 node appliances.

Growing converged infrastructure market

The converged infrastructure market continues to grow and evolve at a phenomenal pace. According to IDC, the converged infrastructure segment grew 68.5 percent from 2012 to a $1.4B market opportunity in 2013. This market is predicted to expand to $17.8 billion in 2016 . In addition to the established Integrated Systems (VCE Vblock) and Integrated Reference Architectures (EMC VSPEX), the emerging Converged Infrastructure market segment—defined as hyper-converged—is gaining pace, is presenting considerable opportunity, and is very relevant to EMC and to its partners.

EMC VSPEX Blue Manager

EMC VSPEX BLUE Manager integrates with VMware’s EVO:RAIL user interface and leverages the same design principles to provide a seamless and harmonious experience that embodies the simplicity and ease-of-use functionality that customers expect. From the VSPEX BLUE Manager interface users can also conveniently access electronic services (such as EMC Knowledgebase articles), access a wealth of community-sourced online and real-time information, and familiarize themselves with EMC best practices for optimal appliance operations.

VSPEX BLUE Manager provides deeper hardware awareness than is available in the native product alone and is the vehicle by which alerts and notifications are displayed to the user in a simple and easily understood manner. The VSPEX BLUE Manager leverages the underlying VMware Log Insight product in EVO:RAIL to capture events and to provide up-to-the-minute holistic notifications about the state of their virtual applications, virtual machines, and appliance hardware.

EMC CloudArray

EMC recognizes that many VSPEX BLUE customers will want to expand their storage capacity beyond their VSPEX BLUE appliance and leverage third-party cloud providers. VSPEX BLUE Manager’s link and download capability includes access to EMC CloudArray, which enables this capability quickly and easily.

EMC CloudArray software provides scalable, cloud-based storage with your customer’s choice of many leading cloud providers, enabling limitless network-attached storage, offsite backup and disaster recovery, and the ability to support both Block and File simply. Each VSPEX BLUE appliance is offered with a free 1 TB of local caching storage, which allows up to 10 TB of total storage when connected to a public cloud provider. CloudArray provides a simple solution to cloud storage with a sophisticated bandwidth scheduler and data reduction technology that minimizes network impact and keeps your VSPEX BLUE running optimally.

Opportunity for partners

VSPEX BLUE provides great opportunity to EMC’s partners to position a complete infrastructure solution that is simple to buy (single SKU), install, manage, and scale. EMC brings unique differentiators with the VSPEX BLUE appliance by integrating EMC’s own software, support, and other leading solutions to provide a complete, all-in-one, Intel-powered, hyper-converged infrastructure appliance.

EMC will focus initially on a select group of partner and distributors for the EMC VSPEX BLUE appliance including Ingram Micro India Pvt Limited, Cadensworth India Limited and Avnet.