By Cat Yong
Avnet Technology Solutions (Avnet) has entered into an exclusive APAC-wide agreement with EMC, to provide assembly, integration, logistics and services around the VSPEX BLUE framework. This is aimed to ensure speed and lower cost to market, according to EMC Malaysia’s Managing Director, Cheam Tat Inn.
Cheam said, “Avnet will deal with the OEM (Foxconn), negotiate pricing, set the margin… this is a revolutionary business model which targets medium-level businesses, but also allows (the VSPEX BLUE) solution to be at par with those of major players’ in the space.”
Despite the solution being aimed at the SMB space which according to Avnet Malaysia General Manager, Chiew Yue Lam, “…is very, very big,” VSPEX BLUE is also robust enough to scale up for usage by higher-end SMBs, departments and remote offices.
VSPEX BLUE is based on a hyperconverged architecture whereby all the capabilities of a system – compute, memory, storage, network and management – are virtualised and hosted in standard hardware.
Technology from sister company, VMware, provides the underlying infrastructure which is scalable, and VMware’s EVO:rail engine, automates as many as 200 steps, drastically reducing set up time to only 15 minutes.
The secret sauce however is EMC’s VSPEX BLUE software, which offers management, automation and updates to the whole system from a single management console.
Chiew observed that the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) solution is well suited for Malaysian mid-market customers who would like to completely consolidate their IT environment.
IDC research finds that the converged infrastructure segment grew 68.5-percent from 2012 to USD1.4 billion in 2013. The revenue growth rate of the hyperconverged segment however, was indicated to be 150-percent in 2014. In contrast, overall IT spending growth rate for the same period was about 4 percent.
Chiew foresaw that majority of usage for the solution in Malaysia, would be to virtualise IT environments.
“When it comes to virtualisation in Malaysia, the adoption level is still below 20-percent, compared to Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia, which have already breached that level.
“There is a lot of room for virtualisation to pick up, and the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, is the perfect box (for this),” Chiew concluded.
