Dell has introduced a nice converged system for the SMB and remote office marketplaces in the VRTX, writes Wikibon Analyst, Founder, and Managing Consultant of the 1610 Group, and former CIO Scott Lowe in his latest Wikibon Alert. The VRTX is unusual in its size — it is limited to four servers and 48 TB of storage. “And that’s it,” he writes. “There is no ‘expansion pack’ or ‘scalability cable’ that magically expands the VRTX beyond these walls.”

Physically it is a small box that can fit under a desk or in a corner of the otherwise empty office or closet that serves as the data center for many SMBs and remote offices. Logically it is plug-and-play, simple to set up and run. It supports both Hyper-V and vSphere and is managed on a single pane of glass with Dell’s OpenManage Essentials. Overall, writes Lowe, it is a good fit for its intended market.

My Analysis

The big question here may be how much of a market is waiting for it. Most SMBs, outside of the IT industry and “Beltway Bandits”, who need high security and tight physical data control to satisfy the security requirements of their government clients, get no competitive advantage from internal IT. Instead, it is just a source of distraction, expense, and vexation. They are better advised to replace their data centers with SaaS  providers, and rent their desktops and laptops, possibly as VDI images that can run on tablets as well as traditional Windows systems, from local computer service companies who will provide maintenance and support as part of the deal.

Corporate remote offices are a different situation, but even here as central IT moves to a hybrid cloud model it will be more logical to provide IT through that cloud rather than maintaining hardware, and staff to run it, in each office. Dell has what sounds like a nice package here, and undoubtedly it will find a market in today’s environment. But that is likely to be a shrinking one.