SAN FRANCISCO – Dell Technologies introduced the updated VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform at this week's VMware Explore 2022 event, along with the deployment expansion of its APEX portfolio of as-a-service offerings and a new automatic machine learning platform for better performance and automation in the multicloud and edge environments.  

The two companies jointly engineered the VxRail products and continued their HCI partnership after the spinoff. “Today we have over 19,000 customers and have deployed nearly 250,000 VxRail nodes,” Shannon Champion, VP of product marketing at Dell, said during a VMware Explore 2022 press briefing. 

The updated VxRail supports VMware’s vSphere 8, vSAN 8, and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.5 software stack for hybrid cloud. vSphere is VMware’s cloud computing virtualization platform and vSAN is the vendor’s software-defined storage product in the HCI stack. 

Dell claims it is the industry-first jointly engineered HCI solution support for data processing units (DPUs), as vSphere 8 has been re-architected to run on GPUs and offload application and networking services from the system CPU, Champion noted. 

“DPU is really intended to lay the groundwork for the future and will be a game changer for increasing workload demands on servers and the need for distributed scalable virtualized networking and security services,” she said. 

Additionally, Dell optimized all NVMe VxRail models for vSAN Express Storage Architecture, “which will enable users to run more high-performance applications in VxRail environments,” according to Champion. And she claims it will bring up to four times greater performance.

Dell also added rugged modular nodes for deployment in high latency, low bandwidth locations.

“The new ruggedized modular nodes can be racked, stacked, and mounted for use anywhere in almost any environment and scale from two to 64 nodes,” Champion explained, adding that those modular notes at the edge are ideal for industries such as retail, military, and manufacturing. 

Dell plans to release the updated VxRail products in the second half of this year.

The company also added managed VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) services to its APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud to support cloud-native applications alongside the traditional virtual machine-based workloads, according to Chad Dunn, VP of product management for Dell Apex.

“The nice thing about TKG in this use case is you have flexibility of adding VM-based services and container-based services all on the same infrastructure,” Dunn said. “You can balance those resources according to the needs of your business and the needs of your IT organization.”

Dell expanded the geographical availability for this service as well, adding Australia and New Zealand to the existing locations including the U.S., United Kingdom, France, and Germany. 

Plus, APEX Private Cloud and APEX Hybrid Cloud now offer new compute-only options to support more workloads and increase IT infrastructure efficiency.

The last new addition is the Dell Validated Designs for AI– Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML), which uses automated machine learning models to help data scientists develop artificial intelligence- (AI) powered applications. 

“It's kind of like AI to do AI,” Champion said. “And this integrated solution includes H20 Ai, which is a driverless AI to automate machine learning, together with Nvidia AI Enterprise Suite for cloud-native AI development and deployment, delivered on VMware vSphere with Tanzu on an engineer validated and optimized Dell infrastructure stack that has VxRail or PowerEdge together with PowerSwitch and PowerScale.”

Read all of SDxCentral's VMware Explore 2022 coverage here.