Built for modern storage demands

A solution built for modern storage demands

Enterprises are producing, ingesting and storing more data than ever before. Traditional SAN storage offers the high performance and high availability required to support business applications, hypervisors, file systems and databases. But a SAN doesn’t provide the massive scalability, linear performance gains and resilience required by modern enterprise data centers.

Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes converge storage and compute resources, aggregating capacity and performance with simplified management capable of starting small and scaling in discrete increments. Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes bring together Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with Dell EMC VxFlex OS software in scalable, reliable and easy-to-deploy building blocks for hyperconverged or server SAN architecture, multi-hypervisor or bare metal environments, and high performance databases.

Each Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Node consists of:

VxFlex Ready Nodes offers flexibility in deployment options

HCI/single-layer architecture: An HCI model, where compute and storage reside within the same server, creates a single-layer architecture and offers the best TCO savings while allowing you to modernize your data center with greater efficiency.

Two-layer model: Redesign your storage environment using a traditional two-layer model to resemble a traditional SAN architecture. A two-layer model provides efficient parallelism and no single points of failure. Additionally, storage and compute nodes remain separate operationally, giving teams the flexibility to manage each infrastructure independently.

Either option fits within your existing infrastructure and provides massive scalability with linear performance gains and enterprise‑grade, no‑compromise resilience - in a validated, configured and supported building block that’s quick and easy-to-deploy.

Quick and easy deployment

Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes reduce the time IT spends planning and deploying new architectures. Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes are:

• Configured, tuned and optimized to simplify VxFlex OS deployment and ease scaling projects
• Easy-to-deploy, operate and manage with VxFlex OS
• Supported by a single vendor - Dell EMC - for streamlined, collaborative support from the first call

Enterprise‑grade resilience

Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes provide enterprise‑grade resilience and 6x9s availability by running the storage software directly on application servers. Designed for extensive fault tolerance and availability, the solution effectively handles failures of media, connectivity and nodes, and software interruptions so that no single point of failure can interrupt the input/output (I/O) service.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R640, R740xd and R840 Servers are a perfect foundation, with high‑availability features such as hot‑pluggable and hot‑swappable power supply units (PSUs), hard disk drives (HDDs) and fans, and a dual SD card option for fail‑safe hypervisors. In addition, Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes support and integrate with Dell EMC data protection services, enabling ERP admins and DBAs to manage, control and protect their growing physical and virtual systems and database environments effectively using tools from the Dell EMC Data Protection Suite, such as Data Domain (DD) with DD Boost, Networker and RecoverPoint.

Scalable performance

Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes are designed to scale massively. Unlike most traditional storage systems, as the number of storage devices grow, so does throughput and IOPS. The scalability of performance is linear with regards to the growth of the deployment. You can add servers and storage modularly so resources can grow individually or together to maintain balance. Every server in the cluster is used in the processing of I/O operations, making I/O and throughput accessible to any application within the cluster. Throughput and IOPS scale in direct proportion to the number of servers and local storage devices added, improving cost/performance rates with growth. Plus, Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes are based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, which deliver higher core counts for I/O intensive applications, reducing bottlenecks and further improving performance.

VxFlex OS

VxFlex OS is a scale-out block storage service that enables customers to create a scale-out Server SAN or hyperconverged infrastructure. It is the next generation software technology powering the VxFlex family to deliver:

Wide Distribution of Data for Massive Performance

VxFlex OS widely distributes data across all storage resources in the cluster, which eliminates the architectural problems of other IP-based storage systems. With VxFlex OS, all the IOPS and bandwidth of the underlying infrastructure are realized by a perfectly balanced system with no hot spots.

Massive Availability and Resiliency

VxFlex OS has a self-healing architecture that employs many to many, fine-grained rebuilds, which is much different than the serial rebuilds seen with most storage products. When hardware fails, data automatically rebuilds using all other resources in the cluster. This enables a 6x9’s availability profile while using x86 commodity hardware. VxFlex OS can rebuild an entire node with 24 drives in mere minutes – a fraction of the time it takes to rebuild a single drive on a traditional array.

Built-In Multipathing

VxFlex OS automatically distributes traffic across all available resources. Every server can be a target as well as an initiator. This means as you add/remove nodes in the cluster, multipathing is dynamically updated on the fly.

Storage Only and/or Hyperconverged

VxFlex OS can be deployed to separate compute and storage nodes, and it can be deployed as a hyperconverged technology. Moreover, it can encompass both architectures together.