Dell has gone the partnership route to help build out its web-scale converged infrastructure for software-defined storage solutions. The Austin, Tex.-based vendor usually acquires this type of technology but instead have inked two original equipment manufacturing deals with data centre infrastructure vendor Nutanix and flash storage vendor Fusion-IO.
With Nutanix on-board Dell plan to offer a new line of converged infrastructure appliances based on Nutanix Web-scale technology. The combination of Nutanix with Dell XC Series servers will see a scale-out platform for modern data centres with compute, storage and networking in a single offering.
The agreement also includes joint sales, marketing, support and service investments, as well as alignment of product roadmaps.
Ashish Nadkarni, research director in IDC’s Storage Practice, said Dell’s plans to deliver new appliances with Nutanix software is a very compelling offering for customers seeking a web-scale, converged approach to IT. Dell is one of the first major IT vendor to embrace web-scale in this manner by partnering with Nutanix.
The new Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances will be built with Nutanix software running on Dell PowerEdge servers, and will be available in multiple variants to meet a wide range of price and performance options. The appliances are targeted at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtualized business applications, and multi-hypervisor environments.
Nutanix’s web-scale software runs on VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and open source KVM. The Dell XC Series appliances are scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter of this year and will be sold by channel partners worldwide.
According to Nutanix, web-scale infrastructure is fundamentally a new approach to designing, deploying and managing data centres that are radically simple and efficient. web-scale architectures and technologies were pioneered in large cloud and web companies – such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon – and are now being adopted by mainstream enterprises.
The second partnership announcement has Fusion-io‘s all-flash ION Accelerator Appliance being offered as a fully integrated Dell-branded solution featuring flash technology and Dell Acceleration Appliance for Databases. This solution is being slated for accelerating enterprise applications such as Oracle, SAP HANA, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as virtualization workloads.
Gary Smerdon, the executive vice president, and chief strategy officer for Fusion-io, said as more companies implement new data-intensive applications to tackle challenges in their business, the price of slow becomes evermore apparent. All-flash ION Accelerator appliance provides a foundation that delivers application performance, ensuring that businesses can gather actionable business insight from reliable, real-time data.