Dell VRTX
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http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd​
So I've been checking out Dell's new VRTX unit and it looks to be super cool. That's a lot of power in a single box and the low noise means that I can deploy it just about anywhere, even in an office environment under a desk! But I'm trying to figure out where it makes sense. Has anyone played with this or know what the good use cases would be? Having four servers with shared storage in an easy to manage chassis is definitely enticing.
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The VRTX is definitely cool. It's not really focused at the SMB market (rarely does an SMB need to scale up to four compute nodes in one location) but primarily at the enterprise for branch office deployments where a highly reliable, but not HA, platform with a lot of scale is often needed that might need to be deployed in a non-dedicated environment (no server closet, for example.) It is a great design and for a branch office having one of these with Vmware, HyperV or XenServer on there, or even a cloud solution like OpenStack with full hardware support coming from Dell making it effectively never needed for internal IT staff to ever go to the branch office is awesome. It is absolutely perfect for that.
For a traditional SMB, the over the top compute power and single storage / chassis point of failure doesn't make sense typically. Normally SMBs are either concerned with HA, which this cannot provide, or with a much small scale (just one or two servers typically.) There are exceptions, of course, but quad blades in a single chassis with shared storage in a site with its own IT just doesn't leverage what this chassis is designed around.
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So do you feel like this is just more of a gimmick for the non-IT minded or uneducated such as myself?
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Think of it as a remote data center in a box
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@Hubtech said:
Think of it as a remote data center in a box
Yes, or a remote "data closet." If you were to build it yourself, it would be four 1U Dell Intel servers plus a single, large SAS DAS disk array. Perfect for a branch office needing all Dell support combined with simplicity of management but not HA. But quite reliable, just not HA.
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and yes, it is super cool.
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Oh I definitely want one
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me too.
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me three!
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OK, let's all chip in. I'll pay the power bill and give you each remote access.
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I'll give you an example that leaps to mind. We have customers onsite who are a small office of a global brand. They needed some IT kit so their parent company pretty much installed "Standard remote office bundle #1" which means that for 5 people they have a rack with 4 2U servers in it, it's obscene, in terms of compute power it's more than our 600 person business has but it's just a typical case of "Standard remote office bundle #1" makes sense because it's standard and known regardless of whether it's right-specced or total overkill.
Stick a VRTX in there and you've got the same capability under someone's desk.
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@hutchingsp said:
I'll give you an example that leaps to mind. We have customers onsite who are a small office of a global brand. They needed some IT kit so their parent company pretty much installed "Standard remote office bundle #1" which means that for 5 people they have a rack with 4 2U servers in it, it's obscene, in terms of compute power it's more than our 600 person business has but it's just a typical case of "Standard remote office bundle #1" makes sense because it's standard and known regardless of whether it's right-specced or total overkill.
Stick a VRTX in there and you've got the same capability under someone's desk.
Yup, if you are doing that, the VRTX really "ups" the value. Easier to support, easier to deploy. Fewer cables means less to go wrong too.
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@ejmillen said:
So do you feel like this is just more of a gimmick for the non-IT minded or uneducated such as myself?
Not a gimmick, just something that IT people seem to glom onto because it looks so cool and want to use so it gets promoted. Dell doesn't promote for weird usage themselves.
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Something to consider with a VRTX is that that is eight to sixteen Intel Xeon CPUs in a loaded chassis. That is a massive amount of compute power (with very little storage throughput.) So you have the CPU power to handle easily ~400 typical VMs. But the storage capacity and throughput of no more than an R510. Even an R720xd or R730xd has more drive capacity than the VRTX. So the ratio of IOPS and capacity to CPU is wildly different than with normal servers.
