What’s been happening in the world of VxFlex 2019?

Another year down, and another year of incredible things to come.

2019 was an excellent year – but first a quick recap of what VxFlex brings to the market in terms of its unique capabilities today.

As one of our Australian SE’s described it – “An Enterprise-grade storage solution, that also happens to be able to do HCI”. I thought this captured the product perfectly – when looking at the storage functionality from a traditional Enterprise storage perspective, VxFlex OS holds it own. True scale-out (1000’s of nodes), multi-controller, advanced snapshots, thin provisioning, data reduction, shared block storage, and 6 nines availability – all the hallmarks of traditional storage, but with the freedom of x86 and Ethernet, non-disruptive upgrades forever, and a perpetual license that massively reduces TCO over time.

Notably though, in APJ we continue to have many different success stories and customer profiles.

1. I’ll start with the largest one because it was a MONSTER! – Semi-conductor industry, 12 racks wide cluster just for storage, limited due to the fact that it hit the VxFlex 16PiB raw capacity limit. This cluster can deliver north of 30 million 4K random IOPS all day, every day. Absolutely incredible and much more to come.
   
   
2. Financial segment, Oracle RAC clusters, VMware consolidation – another area that VxFlex excels in – storage clusters can server multiple workloads eliminating all silos in the DC. No more cluster affinity where resources become unbalanced and utilisation wasted. Oracle DB’s using bare-metal and high clock speed CPU’s to keep efficiency and costs at their optimal levels. This is really the bread and butter for our VxFlex install base today.
   
   
3. Oil & Gas, Power companies, Service Providers, Telco’s, Education, the list of the other verticals just goes on and on. Some of them have massive OLAP requirements demanding the highest in bandwidth – we have one customer that is achieving 20GB/s per node! (2x 100GbE setup), while others in the Education market are looking for a product that can support multi-hypervisor / bare-metal / containers. For Telco’s NFVi all the way, and for Power companies we have our VxFlex integrated rack as our turn-key offering where time to market is the driving factor.
   
   

What’s coming in 2020?

So far we’re off to fast start with a some new notable logos to solve difficult workload problems that other solutions have a lot of difficulty in achieving. One of those being a Service Provider who needs to achieve a guaranteed 8000/IOPS per TB which their traditional all-flash storage was unable to deliver. (The controllers soon became the bottleneck).

In terms of VxFlex OS updates, among many other enhancements – there is one very major new capability coming this year which will be announced at Dell Technologies World in May. This particular capability been very long-awaited by many customers who still have a dependency on a common traditional storage array functionality today. 2020 is indeed going to be a year to remember!