It's small, heavy, and powerful, and in the right hands it can do a lot. Its manufacturer calls it VRTX. It's short for vertex, which in mathematics means the point of intersection of lines. Or, in astronomy, it is the point towards which several stars are heading. Dell describes the PowerEdge VRTX solution as an intersection of servers, storage, networking and management. All in a single chassis optimized for small and medium-sized businesses. But, be warned: not just any business.
I worked hands-on with a VRTX in preparation for a product demonstration. On that occasion, I took the device up to our headquarters on the third floor of a chic building without an elevator. First impression: it's heavy, although it has the dimensions of a slightly larger tower PC. It's so heavy that we had to disassemble it. We transported the hard drives separately, and two strong men (they claim) pulled the case until they brought it to our bright attic. This is where the beautiful part of things began.
We discovered that we have in front of us a solid, compact server, which offers an infinity of possible configurations with accessories and components that are easy to change. The sober and elegant design makes it easy to integrate into any type of company. At first glance, it does not even reveal its capabilities hidden under the casing, especially since the noise it makes is of "office" level. The cooling system configuration allows operation in office conditions, even with the air conditioning turned off outside of working hours. Also, the power supply is adapted to the usual electrical current sources, 110 or 220 volts.
We implemented on VRTX the infrastructure of a hypothetical secret service specialized in blocking international financial attacks. The „client” came from the demonstration scenario I wrote about in the previous article. We learned on this occasion that PowerEdge VRTX offers a relatively intuitive deployment experience. The installation process is quite fluent for a blade center solution. The server is easy to customize, and the interface, although not exactly ergonomic, allowed us to deploy a Hyper-V Cluster solution in just two days.
The rule of keeping strong essences in small containers applies here as well. The most suitable customer for VRTX is a small or medium-sized company, with 25 to 100 employees, that needs high computing power. Companies with high productivity employees, such as those in engineering, legal services, software development, that value maintaining core infrastructure in the local network, qualify. A secondary profile is that of funded start-ups that want to grow very quickly using a private cloud infrastructure.
The strongest argument for choosing a VRTX is a combination of factors that turn it into a concentrated package of strength: it takes up little space, is powerful and relatively quiet, easy to install and use.
The solution is NOT recommended for companies that have a datacenter and over 100 employees and that do not need high computing power. Also, very large or very small companies, as well as medium-sized ones with below average productivity, should go for a more "gentle" solution in terms of computing power and price.
What customer requirements make us recommend a VRTX?
Which brings us to (perhaps) the only downside: the PowerEdge VRTX is relatively expensive, for it offers datacenter-like capabilities. In fact, that's the point: with the money for a VRTX you can almost deploy a datacenter... if you have enough space, which also costs money.
PowerEdge VRTX is a classic hardware solution (networking, servers, storage) put into a compact and powerful package. It's a private cloud in a single box.
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