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Iron Bow offering Dell's Hyberconverged Infrastructure Solutions
James RogersApril 22 20244 min read

Three Ways to Simplify Your Workloads with Dell's Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions

Is your current technology stack holding you back from achieving your strategic goals? At Iron Bow, we recognize technology’s pivotal role in driving your organization’s success. That's why we've teamed up with Dell Technologies to offer their suite of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions designed to improve cost effectiveness, reduce complexity and deployment time, and prepare your company to take full advantage of today’s dynamic hybrid multicloud environment. 

Your IT team probably deals with the challenge of managing virtualized and containerized tasks on complicated IT systems. But with the latest hyperconverged infrastructure, you can simplify things. HCI is like an all-in-one solution that combines servers and storage in one place, making it easier to manage and reducing costs. Instead of having separate storage devices, everything runs on the same servers, making it simpler and more efficient. 

Migrating to an HCI solution is a great opportunity to re-evaluate the cost effectiveness of your current virtualization platform. With that in mind, we’re going to cover three HCI options from Dell that support VMware vSphere, Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), and Dell’s own PowerFlex platform. Whether you're aiming to enhance cost efficacy, boost workload performance, or simplify operations, Dell's HCI solutions are engineered to deliver tangible outcomes that align with your mission and business priorities. 

Let’s take a look at each of these solutions in turn, starting with Dell VxRail. 

Extend VMware with Dell VxRail 

Our first solution, Dell VxRail, is built on VMware vSAN. VxRail fits seamlessly into existing VMware vSphere environments and provides a powerful and easy-to-use orchestration layer over the top of VMware’s tried and true vSAN HCI platform. VxRail showcases the true beauty of HCI by allowing your organization to expand when and where needed. Need additional compute? Dell offers single, dual, and quad-core nodes supporting up to 56 cores per socket and 8TB of RAM. Adopting AI? Accelerator-optimized nodes support up to six GPUs each. Need additional storage? Storage-dense nodes offer up to 28 drives and can be augmented with a Dell PowerStore appliance.   

These nodes can be mixed and matched up to a maximum of 64 nodes per cluster, large enough to power even the most intensive business workloads. No matter what your organization needs, VxRail can meet the demand on day one and continue to grow with your business regardless of what comes your way. 

Embrace Nutanix with the Dell XC Family 

The Nutanix suite is a robust and comprehensive virtualization platform that is known for dependability and ease of management. Nutanix offers tools that allow seamless migration from existing VMware environments, eliminating the pain associated with infrastructure transitions. 

Dell offers the XC family of hyperconverged hardware for Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), fully validated by Nutanix to ensure maximum reliability, robust support, and ease of management. Nodes arrive from the factory with AHV pre-installed, eliminating the need for foundation servers. This approach allows Nutanix to be fully deployed within your organization and ready for production in a matter of minutes! Moreover, support is a breeze with visibility from the Nutanix Prism management console into the full range of hardware sensors and status information. Upgrades can be performed with a single click, including firmware updates for XC hardware. 

The XC Family solutions, powered by integrated Nutanix software and Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon processors, deliver the performance and scalability required to meet the evolving demands of modern businesses.  

Deliver Unbounded Flexibility with PowerFlex 

Rapid changes in technology are driving unprecedented demand for flexibility and elasticity. Companies have critical workloads spread across geographically disparate on-premises data centers and in cross-continental regions of multiple cloud service providers. Traditional architectures aren’t designed with flexibility in mind, relegating your data and workloads to whichever locations have the hardware. 

Dell’s PowerFlex platform lets you break out of the traditional hardware lock-in. It gives you the power to map your data storage to your workloads wherever they sit and to change locations dynamically with the click of a button. You can maintain baseline compute and storage hardware at multiple data centers and spin up additional HCI nodes on demand with the cloud service provider of your choice in a matter of minutes, letting you move your data as business needs dictate. This approach also allows you to avoid cloud lock-in, because moving from provider to provider is as simple as clicking a button. 

Explore HCI with Iron Bow  

Iron Bow, along with our partners at Dell, is committed to empowering you to simplify and streamline your workloads while aligning with your preferred operating models. Whether it’s VMware, Nutanix, or PowerFlex, Dell and Iron Bow have a solution that is tailor-made to meet your business goals. We have the hardware, software, professional services, and flexible financing options necessary to take your IT operations to the next level. Dell-Logo

Ready to unlock the full potential of your IT infrastructure? Reach out to our team of experts. Contact Us 

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James Rogers

James is an IT executive and storage architect at Iron Bow Technologies with two decades of experience designing, procuring, deploying, and operating world-class data storage systems. Prior to joining Iron Bow, James served as the Director of Data Center and Cloud Engineering for the US Department of Veterans Affairs, managing a team of 110 engineers and a budget of $200M. Under his stewardship, VA eliminated over $300M in storage-related technical debt through the deployment of next-generation storage, backup, and disaster recovery hardware and cloud services.

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