As the final days of 2017 are rapidly approaching and the holiday season is in full swing, we provide you with a second set of updates to the SDS & HCI matrix – so we can enter the New Year fresh and without any back-log. Just a week ago we updated the content for both DataCore and Nutanix platforms. Today we publish updates to two other platforms: HPE SimpliVity 380 and Dell EMC VxRail. The brunt of both content updates are tied to the introduction of next-generation server hardware featuring the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, also known as Skylake, and thus are able to provide a lot of extra muscle in terms of raw compute power. In both cases the new server hardware also provides more PCI slots to add additional network adaptors or GPUs.
In late November Dell EMC launched VxRail on 14th generation PowerEdge servers, whereas late in December HPE launched SimpliVity 380 on HPE’s 10th generation ProLiant servers. Both are following in the wake of Cisco that already launched HyperFlex on Cisco UCS M5 servers sporting the new generation Intel processors late September of this year.
“We hope Dell EMC’s ScaleIO.Next will arrive on time to be included in our “SDS/HCI Landscape Report Q1 2018”
Prior to the server hardware refresh, HPE SimpliVity introduced significant improvements to their very own DR orchestration solution, RapidDR. These have also been accounted for in this SDS/HCI update.
Here’s the highlights of what has been improved, added and/or removed:
HPE SimpliVity 380 v3.72 & RapidDR v2.0
- Support for HPE ProLiant Gen10 server hardware featuring Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
- Support for mixing Gen9 and Gen10 nodes within the same cluster, although it is recommended to use the same CPU model across an entire cluster.
- Introduction of Extra Small (XS) model for SMB Remote Office use-cases, that caters less storage per node.
- Support for more than one additional network adapter.
- Support for a single NVIDIA Tesla M10 GPU card in the new HPE ProLiant Gen10 server hardware.
- Support for hardware-based data-at-rest encryption (DARE) through the HPE Smart Array controller inside HPE ProLiant Gen10 server hardware, in order to offer protection against data theft.
- RapidDR introduces priority-based parallel recovery of VMs, thus significantly reducing failover time (up to 80% compared to sequential failover time).
- RapidDR introduces setting recovery order priority at both the recovery group level and the individual VM level, where the recover group level priority takes precedence.
- RapidDR now provides proactive assessment of the source site configuration.
- RapidDR now provides choice out of four recovery actions if VM recovery fails.
- HPE OmniStack REST API v1.6 extends functionality by adding new fields to several object types.
Dell EMC VxRail v4.5
- No significant software updates as the solution is already running the latest version of vSAN (v6.6) at its core.
- Support for Dell PowerEdge Gen14 server hardware featuring Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
- Removal of General Purpose (G-Series) hardware model that supported up to 4 nodes in a single 2U chassis from the Dell PowerEdge Gen14 VxRail line-up.
- Support for NVIDIA Tesla GPUs as add-on in PowerEdge Gen14 server hardware (up to 3x NVIDIA Tesla M10 or up to 2x NVIDIA Tesla M60 per individual node).
- Each VxRail node on Dell PowerEdge Gen14 server hardware contains 2x 240GB M.2 SSDs with RAID1 protection to host the VMware vSphere hypervisor software.
Based on the announcement made by Dell EMC back in May at EMC World 2017 we were still expecting the grand entrance of Dell EMC’s software-defined storage platform ScaleIO.Next (aka ScaleIO 3.0) before year’s end. However it appears we have to wait a little bit longer as this iteration as been pushed back to a 2018 release date. We hope it will arrive on time to be included in our “SDS/HCI Landscape Report Q1 2018”!
Landscape report 2017 – 2018 report coming soon
In this report we’ll look in retrospect how the SDS/HCI market and its inhabitants fared in 2017, evaluate the individual platforms included in our current line-up, and provide you with our view on what to expect in 2018 and beyond. So keep your eyes peeled for more announcements on the SDS/HCI Landscape Report Q1 2018.
Wishing you all a fantastic new year!
Herman Rutten – Lead Category Consultant [SDS & HCI]
Follow us on twitter: @What_Matrix
Herman Rutten
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