Three become one: Dell EMC's VxBlock range is now a seriously big iron

Dell EMC has smushed its three-product VxBlock range into a single, more scalable composable infrastructure – the VxBlock 1000. VxBlocks are rack-scale systems converging separate servers, storage and networking into a single converged infrastructure (CI) system orderable as a single product, and delivered and installed ready …

[sal II]

Dell/EMC Russian roulette

We couldn't make our minds which branches of our now extensive product portfolio to keep. So here is a Russian roulette offering that includes all of them converged. This will increase the chance of one of them being discontinued in the near future, forcing you to replace the whole shebang, instead of individual bits, helping us pay off our massive debt...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dell/EMC Russian roulette

ehhh! No.

You buy the bits you need and you can take out the bits you no longer need.

It just means you can start with one use case, Say VDI with an XIO, then add a new mission critical workload, say SAP with a VMAX.

[sal II]

Re: ehhh! No.

My post was partially sarcastic.

The thing with converged is that you must adhere to the strict list of supported hardware. So replacing individual bits although possible in theory is hard in practice.

But maybe I'm biased from my experience with HPE VS3, couple of years ago. Which looked brilliant on paper, but in reality was piece of manure.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

"Hyperconverged"

"Hyperconverged" is just a buzzword that means "buy everything from us."

[Fenton]

Re: "Hyperconverged"

Now Hyperconverged is something entirely different.

But converged/Hyperconverged also means, get all your support and lifecycle management from one place. Rather than constant finger pointing and time wasted working out which patches/firmware updates work together across different vendors.

[sal II]

Re: "Hyperconverged"

>get all your support and lifecycle management from one place

That sounds good on paper, in reality is the same shambles as you still need to deal with different vendors or arms of the same vendor that don't speak to each other. For example the offering in the article has Cisco kit and most likely vCenter or hyper-v to handle virtualization

I mention my sour experience with HPE VS3 - we spend 3 months going back and forth between Microsoft, HPE and 3PAR (that wasn't fully absorbed into HPE back then) to figure out why we can't integrate the storage array to SCVMM 2012 R2 as it was giving generic error. Until a guy from 3PAR joined the case one day and simply stated - ah it's a known issue, was fixed with inForm OS update months ago...

[aimlesscat]

No news here....just marketing merged 3 separate series into one...which has all of the old components......complete marketing BS. Guess that they need something to make it look like they are moving forward after they dismantled the group.

@sal II....the VS3 was a large steaming pile from a time when HP/HPE thought that they could drive end to end HP stack without concern for customers existing operational models.

[Anonymous Coward]

An update from the 'So What?' Dept. There are a number of those depts at Dell.