Dell adds Nutanix-powered XC630 and XC730 hyperconverged systems

Dell has added three more products to its XC range of hyperconverged storage arrays, the XC630-10 and two XC730, which are aimed at compute/performance-heavy, storage-focused and high-performance use cases.

Dell’s XC series devices marry Nutanix hyperconverged server and storage software with Dell PowerEdge hardware in new configurations.

The XC630-10 is a 1U compute/storage node aimed at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), test-dev, private cloud and virtual server use cases. It has 10 drive slots with a maximum of four flash and eight 1TB HDDs in combination allowed.

Meanwhile, the two XC730-designated products are the xd-12 and xd-24, which are both 2U. The xd-12 product is aimed at storage-heavy deployments, such as Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint, with 12 drive slots for flash and up to 4TB HDDs. The xd-24 product is aimed at performance-intensive database work, with 24 drive slots for flash and 1TB HDDs.

XC products come with Nutanix hyperconverged server/storage software and provide VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor options. Units can be added to scale out, with the Nutanix Distributed File System pooling resources across nodes.

Hyperconverged systems combine processing and storage in one box, with scale-out capability that allows the customer to grow capacity in grid-like fashion.

Their origins are in the hyperscale architectures developed by web giants like Facebook and Google, which build their own server/storage systems from discrete nodes with direct-attached storage.

Pre-configured hyperconverged products that have arisen in their wake allow easy setup and administration, with a virtual machine-friendly architecture for organisations without webscale resources.

Hyperconverged products first came from pioneers such as Nutanix, Simplivity and Scale Computing, and were aimed at fairly limited virtualisation use cases.

More recently, VMware has developed its own EVO:RAIL product, which it sells in conjunction with a range of hardware suppliers, including Dell, EMC, NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, Fujitsu and HP, and are now targeted at a wide range of datacentre workloads.

In the recently published ComputerWeekly IT Spending Priorities survey 2015, 10% of respondents said they planned hyperconverged deployments in their datacentres.

Dell announced its relationship with Nutanix in June 2013, but didn’t launch products until November 2014, when it rolled out a series of XC720-designated products (pictured).