Why do-it-yourself if you don’t have to? The trend is for faster, simpler and more flexible as the nuts and bolts of system architecture become buried deeper and deeper under the hood.

“We’ve quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model,” said Dan McConnell (pictured), vice president of the Converged Platform & Solutions Division at Dell Technologies Inc.  

McConnell spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Dell EMC’s new VxRack Flex rack-scale hyperconverged infrastructure that incorporates its ScaleIO virtual SAN software product, which has been removed from standalone sale. (* Disclosure below.)

VxRack Flex = HCI, plus agility, scale and storage consolidation

“With ScaleIO, what we’re trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model — VxRack Flex. There’s an outbound shift away from … what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering,” McConnell said.

Dell EMC is already the leader in the converged systems market with a 31.1 percent market share. This is mostly driven by HCI sales, which showed a year-over-year growth of 149 percent for the company, faster than the median market.

“We’ve got customers from four nodes, all the way up to … large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes,” McConnell stated.

Adjusting to the needs of such a diverse client base is challenging, and Dell EMC takes a portfolio approach to meet each customer’s needs.

“We’ve got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale … what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute,” McConnell said. “We’ve got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million [input/output operations per second], right? So, performance, I think we’ve got it covered.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE