Dell Technologies announces the Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, powered by VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN software, are certified by SAP for SAP HANA production environments. The certifications, for both VxRail and VMware software, reflect VMware and Dell EMC's continued leadership in the rapidly growing HCI industry.

According to the latest research from IDC, Dell Inc. is once again No. 1 in the hyper-converged systems segment with 28.8% share, for the second quarter of 2018, based on year-to-year growth of 95.2%. Led by the success of Dell EMC VxRail, Dell's growth outpaces the industry, which grew 78.1% to $1.5 billion in system sales for the quarter. For the same period, VMware was tied for No. 1 in hyper-converged systems based on owner of HCI software with 34.1% revenue share, demonstrating the largest year-to-year growth of any named vendor at 96.7%.

Dell EMC VxRail is the industry's only jointly engineered, turnkey, fully integrated HCI appliance with VMware, powered by VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN and pre-tested and pre-configured with the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. These appliances are the easiest and fastest way to simplify a VMware environment for HCI with seamless integration with existing VMware tools. VxRail offers simplicity of lifecycle management and scalability with a cost-effective HCI solution that delivers multiple compute, memory, storage, network and graphics options to match any use case and cover a wide variety of applications and workloads.

"Customers can now get the operational benefits of a fully integrated stack from leading vendors of hyper-converged infrastructure, Dell EMC and VMware, to support their mission-critical, performance-sensitive SAP HANA environments," said Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer, Customer Operations, VMware. "VMware is proud to be working with the leading applications company in the world, SAP, to provide a more secure and flexible digital foundation, to help customers drive a sustainable competitive advantage."

"Dell EMC VxRail makes IT transformation with HCI as simple as possible for customers to adopt and grow," said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC VxRail. "As customers increasingly use VxRail for core data center workloads, this certification makes VxRail, already architected for in-memory database applications, an excellent HCI solution for SAP HANA customers."

"SAP has shared a longtime partnership with VMware and Dell EMC, and together, we've enabled customers to transform their businesses," said Martin Heisig, SAP HANA Technology Innovation Network. "Today's news highlights the depth and breadth of technologies Dell Technologies and SAP are offering to enable companies to optimize their SAP solutions with greater agility, high availability, lower costs and easy provisioning."

VMware HCI powers broadest range of mission-critical apps

VMware's software forms an integrated digital foundation that powers the applications and services transforming businesses and industries.

For customers looking to combine the VMware vSphere High Availability and Fault Tolerance features of the industry's leading hypervisor with the resilience and performance of the industry leading vSAN HCI software, the certification opens a path to the operational simplicity and capital expense savings of HCI for workloads spanning artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Big Data, cloud-native, in-memory, mission-critical and 3D graphics. Today, more than 60 percent of vSAN customers report running business-critical applications such as SAP NetWeaver solutions, SQL Server, Oracle, and, increasingly, containerized and Big Data workloads, on their HCI environment.

The SAP certification process validates VMware vSphere and vSAN software in production environments for both Scale Up and Multi-VM deployment modes deploying the Intel Scalable Xeon Processor Family. As a result of collaboration between VMware and Virtustream, vSphere now supports SAP HANA environments with up to 6TB virtual machines on 4-socket server hardware.

Supporting Quotes

"For 40 years, Mercy Ships has used hospital ships to bring free, life-changing surgeries to people suffering from diseases of poverty in Africa," explained Chris Gregg, CIO of Mercy Ships. "With a core data center in the United States, offices in sixteen countries and a hospital ship in Africa, our needs are complex and constantly evolving. Dell EMC VxRail brings innovation that has helped us move toward our goal of central management.  With its ease of use and ability to scale, this platform has become a critical part of our technology roadmap, in partnership with Dell EMC and technology partner Technologent, as we plan to significantly expand our work and serve more people in Africa."

"Today's digital business broadly expands the scope of applications that are 'mission-critical' because systems of engagement are now the currency of modern business," said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG. "HCI architectures allow customers to expand on the opportunity for greater efficiency and cost savings associated with supporting mission-critical solutions by extending that value to all infrastructure resources. With a unified approach to reliability and uptime, HCI enables users to configure, manage, and debug infrastructure resources in software across a common control plane."

Availability

Dell EMC VxRail is certified for SAP HANA today.