CTO Advisor PoC - Dell EMC VxRail End Design
Transcript
(synthesizer whirring) >> Keith Townsend, Principal of The CTO Advisor. Why is any of this hard? Let's think about this. VMware vSAN has been out for, I don't know, 10 years or so. And we understand it. It's moved tremendously over the past five, six years. At this point, HCI should be solved, right? Why did Dell VMware and Intel invest in sponsoring this research? Well, you know what? The CTO Advisor Hybrid Infrastructure is exactly the reason, or it represents exactly the problem.
When we set out to build the infrastructure, we had this grand vision in mind. We create a data center pod, based off of technology four to five years old. Represent the typical enterprise data center on the journey to integrate hybrid infrastructure. We extended the infrastructure out to the Oracle Cloud out the VMC on AWS, out to Google Compute Cloud. And we Vmotioned, we did the stuff that Pat Gelsinger did on state. We Vmotioned the machine out of the Chicago Data Center on to the data center in the East Coast and Amazon's Virginia region.
It was wonderful. It was actually pretty practical. If you look at the beginning of the COVID, we really didn't know how much capacity we were going to need from VDI. We didn't know how long the lockdowns would last. We didn't know how long we won't work will last. We're still not out of it. Fast forward to today, that capability, you still need it but you also have the challenge of modernizing your data center. So we've extended out to the hybrid infrastructure.
Thom, Alastair have looked at projects inside of the hybrid infrastructure, meaning stuff that reaches out from our private data center into the public cloud, using these public cloud resources. I've reprovisioned these engineers to do this hard, heady work. But we still need to upgrade the infrastructure. We still have a lifecycle to manage. We don't want to build too much technical debt. So when I had Thom go back to look at bringing up our existing infrastructure to the latest versions of vSphere, potentially looking at Intel Xeon, third generation scalable processors.
Thom was a bit of a surprise. He came back with a quote that I'm like, wow. Not just a quote in an amount of money, but the quote in an amount of time that would take from him doing the things that I deemed as an important. Hence the project with Dell EMC VxRail HCI software. We wanted to understand, what is the real value of an HCI system software platform? Can it alleviate some of these pain points? What we discovered, lifecycle management?
Yes, Dell EMC VxRail software can do that, on top of an Intel platform with vSphere. What was surprising was the bits that we weren't expecting. You saw this in some of the videos with Thom and Alastair, the SAS controller, monitoring capabilities, the ability to deploy bits and pieces, the integration VMware Cloud foundation. What does this all come up to and mean from a practical perspective? If we would have standardized on VxRail at the beginning, we would not be in this situation.
0, Update One, I think they're on now. We could have easily made the transition potentially to the third gen of Xeon Scalable processors, without burdening the team. These one click updates. Dell made six specific claims. We answered each one, or we put to test each one of those claims. The next video, we'll share the high level results but more importantly, next week, if you're watching this real time, next week we'll release that report detailing what Alastair and Thom discovered, as we put these claims to the test.
You want to learn more about the project? com/delltech We'll share our overall experience with you. Feedback to me is always welcome. I'm on Twitter, @CTO advisor, DMS are open. Talk to you next, CTO Dose.
