Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure

New Expanded HCI Options Deliver Flexibility and Choice

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Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack family

Microsoft’s partner conference – Microsoft Inspire – is taking place this week. While it will look a little different this year, we are looking forward to virtually networking and discussing what’s coming in the year ahead. This year, Dell Technologies is announcing several new expanded platform options for the Microsoft Azure Stack portfolio that further simplify and automate management as well as provide flexibility and choice.

For those of you not familiar, Dell Technologies offers two comprehensive Azure Stack solutions: Dell EMC Solutions for Azure Stack HCI and Dell EMC Integrated Systems for Azure Stack Hub. While both of these solutions fall under the Azure Stack portfolio, customers deploy them in very different scenarios. Azure Stack HCI is ideal for businesses looking to refresh, modernize and consolidate their traditional on-premises virtualization platforms, while Azure Stack Hub is ideal for businesses wanting to run Azure on-premises due to regulatory compliance, for disconnected or edge use cases, or to address data sovereignty concerns. Dell Technologies makes ordering, deploying and supporting easy by fully certifying, testing and validating all the components plus providing single source solution level support.

First, what’s new with Dell EMC Solutions for Azure Stack HCI

Refreshed AX nodes with enhanced lifecycle management

Since its early preview, Dell Technologies have added value and driven innovation into Azure Stack HCI. To continue down that differentiated path, today we are announcing the refresh of the Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes (S2D RN) to AX nodes as the foundation for Dell EMC’s Azure Stack HCI solution. These new nodes still contain all the goodness from leveraging the industry leading PowerEdge servers as well as Hyper-V, S2D and SDN features but now enable – for the first time – clusters to be seamlessly updated to the Azure Stack HCI solutions catalog using the native OpenManage Integration with Windows Admin Center with zero impact to running workloads. The AX nodes will be available in three flavors – AX-640, AX-740xd and AX-6515 – to meet the needs of various use cases and locations.

Additional choice and flexibility with AMD

We are also announcing, for the first time, a new Dell EMC solution based on AMD EPYC processors for Azure Stack HCI as part of the PowerEdge R6515 platform. These new all-flash AMD 1U single-socket platforms offer dual socket performance making them ideal for general purpose virtualized workloads, VDI and databases. They are available for order now as model number AX-6515 for Azure Stack HCI.

Not to be missed!

As Microsoft Inspire happens this week, look out for the exciting news for what is coming next with Azure Stack HCI and how Dell Technologies will be participating. For those of you attending, our resident Microsoft SME, Michael Wells, will be participating in two Ask the Experts sessions around Azure Stack HCI. The first, Ask the Experts: Intel, Microsoft and OEM Partners Share How to Grow your Business with Hybrid Cloud, hosted by Intel takes place Thursday, July 22nd from 1:15 pm – 1:45 pm ET. The second, Ask the Experts: Discover HCI, hosted by Microsoft, takes place Thursday, July 23rd from 6:45am – 7:15am.

Now on to Dell EMC Integrated Solutions for Azure Stack Hub

GPUs now available to order

Earlier this year we announced, in conjunction with Microsoft, a private preview for GPU-accelerated ML scenarios using NVIDIA GPU’s (V100) and for remote visualization scenarios using AMD GPU’s (Mi25). These new GPU hardware configurations are now available from Dell Technologies with Microsoft software support coming later this summer. In addition to providing customers with increased performance density and workload flexibility, they come fully loaded with automated LCM capabilities and exceptional support.

Extend Azure storage by expanding your on-premises data capacity

Azure Stack Hub is powerful because it enables you to replicate your Azure services on-premises in a consistent manner for a true hybrid cloud experience. However, the amount of data you can extend from Azure has been limited by your Azure Hub configuration. Until now. Now, you can expand the on-premises data storage capacity of Azure Stack Hub by using integration with Dell EMC PowerScale. Dell EMC PowerScale is an optimal storage extension for Azure Stack Hub because it provides a powerful yet simple scale-out storage architecture for massive amounts of unstructured data while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.

About the Author: Shannon Champion

Shannon leads Product Marketing for Dell Technologies’ leading and comprehensive portfolio of primary storage, HCI, and CI offerings. Shannon joined Dell EMC in 2014, helped launch the first EMC hyper-converged solution in that year, and has been part of the hyperconverged marketing team since then. As a marketing and sales enablement expert, Shannon has more than 20 years of experience in several cross-functional and management roles within IT including product marketing, business development, manufacturing and quality with both direct manufacturers and channel partners. Before joining EMC, Shannon led Cisco product management and marketing for a national channel partner, PC Connection; was a product marketing manager and quality engineer for the IBM/Lenovo PC Division; and worked as a manufacturing process engineer for IBM’s microelectronics division. Shannon received her M.B.A. from Kenan-Flagler School of Business in North Carolina, and her M.S. and B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester in upstate NY. Dell Technologies helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live and play. The company provides customers with the industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the data era. Our industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies enables organizations to modernize, automate, and transform their data center.