By now you have probably heard the EMC debut their flavour of EVO:RAIL calling it VSPEX Blue. It’ build upon the foundation of EVO:RAIL’s quick time-to-value, taking as little 15mins or less to setup – by adding and extending it with EMC software. Like all our Qualified EVO:RAIL Partners (QEP), EMC are free to add-value to core EVO:RAIL system, but bundling complementary software and services. As you might know from a hardware perspective every EVO:RAIL offers much the same hardware resouces, so QEP’s differentiate (or compete) by offering such add-ons.
I was lucky to get a pre-briefing on VSPEX Blue along side the EMC Elect – that’s program that’s similiar to VMware’s vExpert program – and comprises popular bloggers and industry-types who are primarily focused on EMC products and solutions. EMC’s VSPEX Blue ships with the VSPEX Blue Manager software which extends hardware monitoring, and intregrates with EMC Connect Home, and online support facilities. Additionally, EMC have added access to the VSPEX Blue Market, which offers value-add software products included with VSPEX Blue. This little architecture diagram below shows how VSPEX Blue Manager fits in with the overall architecture:
It interface with the BMC Controller on the appliance itself as well communicating to/from vCenter and EVO:RAIL Engine – then North-bound up to additional EMC Cloud Services. That ERSE/VE component you see in the diagram responsible for the “Connect Home” support which allows for monitoring, notification and remote troubleshooting.
EMC have opted to extend the EVO:RAIL UI with an “VSPEXS Blue Market” – a kind of “AppStore” experience for downloading other add-ons included in the package. This includes such things as:
- EMC CloudArray Virtual Editions
- EMC RecoverPoint for VMs
- VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDPA)
The idea of including EMC CloudArray is leverage public and private cloud storage to extend VSPEX Blue’s storage capacity – include in the package is 1TB cache, and 10TB of storage (support is included). EMC CloudArray offers:
- Encyption in-flight and at-rest
- Bandwidth throttling and data compression
- Snapshots
- NAS support for NFS/CIFS
As for EMC RecoverPoint for VMs this ships with built-in licenses to protect up 15 VMs – with option to acquire more licenses to protect additional VMs. It plugs into the vCenter UI for per-VM protection in away that you might be familiar with VMware’s vSphere Replication. The difference is whereas vSphere Replication of an asynchronious replication with 15min RPO (which is good 99% of most applications and environments), EMC’s RecoverPoint for VM supports sychronious replication (assuming your network can meet the latency/round-trip requirements).
Finally, VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced (VDPA) is backup solution based around EMC’s Avamar de-duplication technology. It offers variable-length de-duplication utilization VMware’s “Change Block Tracking” (CBT) feature. VDPA includes the option to backup EMC Data Domain Target. Finally, VDPA supports application-consistent.
As for support it looks as if EMC are offering 3 different levels (Basic, Enhanced, Premium). Basic/Enhanced come with next-busines-day from parts perspective; whereas basic comes with 9to5 support, Enhanced comes with 24×7 support, Enhanced will offer 24x7x4 support for parts, and includes such options as remote monitoring and repair – together with assisted updates for software.
EMC have kindly supplied some screen grabs in advanced of the launch for those invited the call. I’ve listed these below – so you can get a handle on what the UI looks and feels like. What I really like is how EMC have to taken the look and feel of the EVO:RAIL Management UI and created their own front-end for VSPEX Manager which looks ever bit like the core EVO:RAIL UI….
