What’s the difference between an “enterprise” product and an “SMB” product? Answer: there really is no such difference – it’s about the right solution for the right application. Case in point, let’s talk about EVO. EVO you say? Isn’t that used by huge corporations who are laying out new data centers from scratch? Not always…
I have one customer that deals with ocean going vessels who only gets to board typically once a year. His primary concern is not cost, it’s physical size and heat production. The conversation originally started with VSAN but he expressed tremendous interest in EVO when exposed to it since he needs redundancy due to limited access, as well as robustness, since they’re hoping to deploy VDI into the same environment in the future.
I have another customer in nation mill producing flour that is splitting off from their previous parent company and needs significant infrastructure across 44 locations, since they’re essentially having to build everything from scratch under significant time constraints. And I have a third customer who’s considering EVO for a newly acquired second site with limited or no IT support, who needs something rapidly deployable and easily manageable since it may also become their DR site. So as you can see, EVO could be relevant to your business regardless of its size.
I was recently asked by a customer if they could purchase EVO Rail Appliances from multiple vendors for use within the same datacenter. An interesting question.
If you’re not familiar with the EVO Rail it is, at a high level, a single 2U appliance containing 4 ESXi hosts, a Virtual SAN (VSAN) storage array, the vCenter Server, Enterprise Plus VMware software, and 3 years of support on the hardware and software. This allows a rapid deployment of a Software Defined Data Center ready for virtual machines in as little 8 minutes after connection and power on.
Since the EVO Rail is an appliance, and not customizable, customers are interested in what the growth path is for this solution. Currently the growth path is to add additional EVO Rail appliances into a single stack. This allows you to have a 16 node High Availability (HA) vSphere cluster with a large single VSAN datastore managed by a single vCenter server.
Now to the customer’s question. You can purchase for example two devices from two different Qualified EVO Partners (QEPs) and they can coexist within the same environment. However, these will necessarily be two individual 4 host clusters each with their own vCenter Server. To truly integrate or stack the EVO Rail appliance would require that you stick with a single vendor.
So remember, don’t always confine yourself to thinking about your company size and what products that are supposed to be best for your ’type’ of customer. Instead, really look at what your business needs, and look up and down our entire portfolio. You may be pleasantly surprised.
For more information, visit the EVO product page or try EVO:RAIL for yourself as part of VMware’s Hands-on Labs.
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Ivan Talley has over 20 years of experience as a Network Engineer in medium size business data centers. His expertise also includes multiple verticals such as consulting engineering, contract electronics manufacturing, waste management, and legal services.
from vmwarenews.de , Original Post Here
