VCE invites mid-size firms to the Vblock party with latest release
VCE, the consortium providing datacentre equipment to serve cloud computing platforms, has expanded its product range.
The Cisco, EMC and VMware joint venture announced on Thursday it will release the Vblock System 100 and 200 ranges in March. It also revealed upgrades to existing Vblock System 300 and 700 machines. Vblock systems combine Cisco servers and networking equipment, EMC storage and VMware virtualisation software and are aimed at providing machines to form the backbone of cloud infrastructure.
A separate range of Vblock machines, based around four and eight node Xeon E7 clusters, has also been certified to run SAP's Hana big data analytics platform and will be made available in the second quarter of this year, VCE announced. It is the first of what VCE said will be specialised Vblock systems aimed at specific business tasks.
The Vblock System 100 is targeted for use in remote or branch offices and comes in two models. The Vblock System 100 Model BX comes in a 24U half-rack and has three UCS C220 M3 servers, two Catalyst 3750-X switches and one EMC VNXe 3150 platform with 6TB of usable storage. The Vblock System 100 Model DX comes in a full 42U rack and with three of the UCS C220 M3 servers, but can be expanded up to eight. This DX includes two Catalyst 3750-X switches and one VNXe 3300 with 8TB of capacity.
Both models use VMware's vSphere Enterprise Plus 5.1 server virtualisation stack. The Vblock System 100 entry price is $180,000.
Vblock System 200 machines are aimed at distributed environments and datacentres run by medium-size companies, which VCE classes as companies spending between $3.5m and $14m each year on IT.
The machines will contain UCS C220 M3 rack servers, Nexus 5548 switches and the EMC VNX 5300 storage array. The system comes in a base configuration with four server nodes and up to 25 drives in the VNX array and a max configuration with 12 nodes and up to 105 discs in the VNX array. Vblock System 200 machines run the vSphere Enterprise Plus 5.1 virtualisation stack and include the Nexus Advanced Essentials switch. The list price of a base Vblock System 200 will be $350,000.
Vblock System 300 and 700 machines will be upgraded to the latest Intel Xeon E5 processors, but will also be used with the Xeon Processor 5600.
These machines can contain the VNX 5300, 5500, 5700, and 7500 storage platforms, Nexus 5548 and 5596 switches and run the vSphere 5.0 or 5.1 virtualisation stacks.
VCE also announced the release of a new cluster management tool called VCE Vision Intelligent Operations.