LAS VEGAS -- As president of Dell EMC's converged platforms division, Chad Sakac leads a group that performs a lot of balancing acts. Dell EMC's converged platforms include products in the fast-growing hyper-converged market as well as the converged infrastructure (CI) systems that hyper-convergence often replaces. It also sells converged infrastructure built around Cisco servers and switching, as well as those with Dell's own hardware that competes with Cisco. And its #hyperconverged products include #XC appliances powered by #Nutanix software through a #DellOEM deal before its merger with #EMC. XC systems compete with #VMware #vSAN-powered #VxRail, an EMC product before the merger.  Customers may need a scorecard to keep track of Dell EMC's hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) lineup. Besides VxRail and XC, there is #VxRack rackscale #HCI and #VxRackFlex with EMC's ScaleIO #softwaredefined #blockstorage. And Dell-owned #VMware sells its #vSAN software standalone and through other hardware partners. On the CI side, Dell EMC recently pared its product line by eliminating VBlock -- the original CI product -- in favor of #VxBlocks with VMware software-based switching instead of #Cisco 's.
We caught up with Sakac at VMWorld 2017 to discuss all things converged and hyper-converged. He said while hyper-converged is "hot, hot, hot," it still has a long way to go to catch traditional SANs, and admitted the decision to scrap the Vblock CI brand caused "sleepless nights." Where's the storage news at VMworld? Sakac: One of the big storage news pieces is the ongoing market shift toward software-defined. I wrote in my blog that the official Dell Technologies point of view is the majority of workloads today can be well-served by software defined storage/HCI. And coming from the storage market leader, that's a pretty strong statement. If you're not an incumbent, you have nothing to lose. If you are an incumbent with hundreds of thousands of customers, people who've built their careers on SANs, to say we think today the majority of workloads would work fine on ScaleIO, on vSAN and on VxRail, VxRack -- that's a big piece of storage news.
No comments:
Post a Comment