Richard Gagnon, CIO of the City of Amarillo, Texas, joins theCUBE host Stu Miniman for a CUBE Conversation from our Boston Studio. Visit thecube.net for our full catalog of interviews. #CUBEConversation #theCUBE #RichardGagnon https://siliconangle.com/2020/07/09/dell-advances-hci-with-latest-enhancements-for-vxrail-and-vmware-cloud-foundation-vxrailrocks-cubeconversations/ Dell advances HCI with latest enhancements for VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation BY MARK ALBERTSON For much of the past year, Dell Technologies Inc. has been leveraging its relationship with VMware Inc. to advance the hyperconverged infrastructure in meeting the multicloud demands of its customers. Recent announcements from Dell now appear to be aimed at taking that approach to the “extreme.” In a series of announcements made as part of the Dell HCI Digital Launch, the company added details to a set of its latest moves under the theme of “Taking HCI to Extremes.” The latest release is built on the strength of VxRail, VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell’s leading position in the hyperconverged space. “VxRail is integral to the Dell Technologies cloud strategy,” said Jon Siegal (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing at Dell. “VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail equals the Dell Technologies cloud platform. It’s operational consistency across any cloud, whether it’s on-premises, on the edge, or in the public cloud.” Siegal spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell HCI Digital Launch. He was joined by Chad Dunn (pictured, right), vice president of product management HCI at Dell. Miniman also spoke with Richard Gagnon, chief information officer for the City of Amarillo, Texas, in a separate interview. They discussed Dell’s latest offerings to facilitate deployment of HCI in extreme environments, easing the barrier of entry to hybrid cloud, hardware and lifecycle enhancements, and the impact of VxRail in assisting customers during a global pandemic. (* Disclosure below.) Deployment in harsh conditions One of Dell’s latest actions was to announce that VxRail and HCI can now be brought to the most extreme environments. A ruggedized VxRail D Series model was introduced for remote, harsh environments, enabling the deployment of a temperature resilient and shock-resistant data center for mobile command bases, manufacturing environments or even submarines. “It’s driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute, performance and storage out in the edges or some of these more exotic locations,” Dunn said. “We built this D series to enable you to get to extreme locations, with extreme heat, cold, altitude, but still offer operational simplicity.” In addition to bringing Dell’s hyperconverged platform to extreme environments, the company also took steps to lower the barrier to entry for the hybrid cloud. Customers can now deploy VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail using a consolidated, four compute node architecture to support multiple, general purpose virtualized workloads. A more involved eight-node, standard architecture is also now available for dedicated workload domains, such as Horizon VDI and vSphere with Kubernetes. Users will also have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management along with traditional virtual machine-based workloads, all made available via VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 on VxRail 7.0. “Now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications,” Siegal said. “The Dell Technologies cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall when it comes to VxRail.” Hardware and lifecycle offerings Dell strengthened its hardware offerings with the addition of AMD EPYC processors on the VxRail E Series platform, integration of computer graphics capabilities with the Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000 GPU, and VxRail support for Intel Optane Persistent Memory. Optane offers the ability to maintain data integrity when power is lost. The latest news from Dell also includes automated lifecycle management with VxRail, an important consideration for customers such as the city of Amarillo, Texas, which operates without the luxury of extensive pre-release testing environments. “I’ve worked for multibillion-dollar companies where we had massive quality and assurance environments that replicated production,” said Gagnon. “We simply can’t afford that in local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down quality and assurance and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change.”