The Indian Market of Hyper Converged Infrastructure Appliances is being growing consistently. These appliances give lots of benefits to IT Professionals and it helps in the growth of business. PowerEdge Servers also play big role in cost saving by increasing the performance of servers. There are lots of challenges in the entire process. Mr. Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director at VCE shares his views with DT about the industry, performance of the company and challenges for this industry. Below are his views:
DT: How do you see Indian “Converged Infrastructure Appliances” Industry in year 2017? Please share fueling factor for the overall market growth.
Mr. Rajesh: According to Gartner the market for ‘Converged Infrastructure Appliances’, is expected to grow by 60% in 2019, with an expected revenue of 4bn+ by 2020. HCI is set to impact the process of deploying IT in data centers dramatically. The Indian market with its quick adoption of HCI will exceed USD 15 mn in FY 2016, which major implementers being midmarket and large enterprises/corporates.
“The new VCE VxRail Appliance family, powered by VMware’s hyper-converged software, will help Indian IT organizations with a solution that is easy to use and help them drive innovation for the business. Our joint engineering efforts with EMC allow us to bring innovations in the software stack and appliances to our customers and offer the best HCI experience,” said BS Nagarajan, Senior Director – Systems Engineering, VMware India. “Our customers are very excited about the immediate value the new VCE VxRail Appliance family offers them,” he added.
With the rapid implementation of HCI, it is set to become the category leader in terms of revenue, the factor that fuels the recognition and implementation of HCI is the price-performance balance and ease of manageability.
DT: What are the major challenges you seefor this market?
Mr. Rajesh: The Digital India campaign focuses more on distribution of tools and adding value to them rather than acquiring this knowledge via licenses. This makes India a ready environment for the implementation of HCI. The challenges depend more on the enterprise/corporates themselves. Creating a widespread understanding of how HCI will integrate with the data center is critical. Do enough enterprises have planned flash in order to integrate their network with HCIA? Do they have processes in place which are interoperable with processes such as data recovery?Each enterprise has an individual need for which a single vendor must provide stable infrastructure.
DT: What are the major solutions you provide toyour customers?
Mr. Rajesh: VxRail benefits a spectrum of IT professionals from knowledge workers, mobile professionals, designers and engineers. Specifically graphic heavy client visualization requiring increasing levels of performance in OS such as Microsoft 10 as well as productivity of applications and graphic intensive CAD/CAM.
Big data and analytics and Microsoft benefit immensely from VxRail Appliances based on the high performance processing. Remote sites can be managed simplifying IT by deploying cost effective HCI, i.e. VxRail.
For customers seeking to accelerate time-to-value of an enterprise-class client virtualization solution, Dell EMC will offer new configurations of VxRail Appliances with VMware Horizon. The solutions are specifically optimized for client virtualization in order to provide simplified deployment and management of virtual workspaces. The solution, validated by Dell EMC with support from VMware and NVIDIA, offers flexibility and high performance to accommodate a variety of needs and decreases time-to-delivery of the solution from weeks to days.
VxRack System 1000, the only rack-scale hyper-converged system with integrated top-of-rack Spine-Leaf networking and SDN options, is the perfect choice for core data centers that require both enterprise-grade resiliency and the ability to start small and scale easily. Now based on PowerEdge R630 and R730xd servers, these VxRack Systems offer more capacity and 40% more CPU performance without increasing footprint or cost. With more than 20 new configurations, customers have the flexibility to add as needed compute-heavy, storage-heavy or balanced configurations (in both all-flash and hybrid models) as needed to match their workload requirements.
DT: How do sell these solutions to Indianmarket? Please brief about your distribution model.
Mr. Rajesh: Regardless of use case or where an organization is on its journey to the cloud, Dell EMC offers a broad and ever-expanding portfolio of appliances (VxRail or XC Series), rack-scale engineered systems, validated systems, reference architectures and solutions that are optimized for both traditional and cloud-native workloads running in data center core or edge locations.
Dell Financial Services (DFS) has a full range of flexible payment options to support customers wherever they are in their journey to the cloud. Whether a customer is seeking to balance OpEx versus CapEx or determine the right mix of off-premises versus on-premises solutions, DFS has solutions – from traditional leases to the new portfolio of OpenScale flexible consumption solutions – to match the full range of consumption use cases of Dell EMC customers.
DELL EMC has various channels customers can choose to buy its Hyper-converged solutions from. It starts with whole range of trained partner ecosystem that has capabilities to deploy and support complete range of HCI solutions from DELL EMC. Further in order to offer customers choice and flexibility there are multiple models they can choose from. Starting with on-premise deployment where they have choice to house the complete solution in their self-owned DC to providing dedicated infrastructure in third party facility. Again there are finance options from owning the infrastructure to leasing it for short to long term duration.
DT: How do you manage the performance of yourHyper Converged Appliances in this competitive market?
Mr. Rajesh: EMC and VMware uniquely simplify the infrastructure lifecycle by eliminating constant evaluation cycles and testing with continuous integration of advancements in x86 technologies and implementation of the latest enhancements to VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN delivering leading efficiency with data reduction technologies - deduplication, compression and erasure coding. The net result: IT organizations can focus more on innovation by creating an automated, dynamic infrastructure that adapts to their business demands.
DT: What are the key advantages of VxRack and VxRail Appliances?
Mr. Rajesh: •Better all-flash economics that offer 2.5x more usable flash capacity for a similar price versus previous generations.
DT: What kind of complications you face whiledeveloping PowerEdge Servers?
Mr. Rajesh: Dell EMC has always aimed to create products that are sustainable investments for IT decision makers, with an outlook to innovate for the future. This has provided customers with choices by increasing the portfolio to include trends of cloud computing, mobility, big data which 80% of IT decision makers see as investment priorities along with advanced features to counter foreseen developments. A large number of IT decision makers are negatively affected by performance issues particularly in cases of fast access to data. Technically we aimed to increase performance of servers to 71% and save cost by 50%. Creating minimal downtime for updates of servers to 61% less time, increasing the performance aspect. Integration of portfolios allowed us to cater to not just large businesses looking to expand and make full use of advanced features, but also to small businesses with limited IT resources who want to invest in top quality system with entry level budget.
DT: Do you have any expansion plans for Indianmarket in near future?
Mr. Rajesh: The Indian market is progressing towards storage modernization, consolidation, backup and recovery, as well as disaster recovery. The amount of data being produced and stored is at an all-time high across corporates of all sectors and sizes. The need to manage this data effectively has never been of more importance than now, making India a playground for Dell EMC’s HCI appliances implementation.
