VxRail: A customer's journey to

hyper-converged awesome sauce

Key takeaways

• Hear about real-life VxRail experiences from a peer

• Learn about benefits realized

• Find out tips to apply to enable your success

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Agenda

• About Rent-A-Center

• Why HCI and VxRail

• The deployment

• Business value realized

• What’s next

• Best practices

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The customer
• Founded in 1986, Rent-A-Center is one of the
largest rent-to-own operators in the U.S. offering
name-brand furniture, electronics, appliances, and
computers

• Over 1 million customers enjoy flexible rental

purchase agreements with a range of no-hassle Rent-A-Center
payment options Big Brands. Small Payments.

• Operate 4,200+ stores across North America

• More than 20,000 employees produce Mike Conroy

annual revenues over $3.1B Senior Director
Technical Operations
• Market leader in a growing industry, with
focus on acquisitions to accelerate growth

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Mismatched infrastructure
The “before” pic

After years of acquisitions:

• Varying switches
• Clashing servers
• Disparate storage

Key workloads and apps:

• Mobile workforce
• VDI for email, word processing, web
• POS

Biggest challenges:
• Lack of agility
• Administrative overhead
• Performance limits

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Why HCI?

No recreating Product cycles tied to Less staff time Predictable Proof-of-concept

the wheel VMware more tightly spent on researching, economics results
building, maintaining,
supporting
(like in BYO)

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Why VxRail?

(8) VxRail All-Flash G Series nodes running 4.0 code

Simplified Unified HW
Rapid deployment VMware integration Single support #
manageability & SW lifecycle

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Well-appointed infrastructure

After installing VxRail:

• (8) All-flash VxRail G Series
nodes running 4.0 code
• Software defined
• Network
• Compute
• Storage

IT, a strategic function

• Organizational transformation

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VxRail deployment

Implementation
With a trained
script/run book
Partner engagement engineer, only
optimized for
took a few hours
greenfield

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Business value realized with VxRail

Agility Footprint reduction

20X Faster time

to deployment 100+ RU reduction in
data center footprint

Productivity No disruptions

4X More efficient with

familiar VMware tools 100% Fewer support calls
about UI/performance

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What’s next?
Right now
Expanding VxRail cluster to
double our footprint at HQ
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Future
Planning for new VxRail deployments in
retail stores to double again next year
• Over 20K remote users
• Different workloads
• 10X more density
Best practices

Standards matter There are implementation Listen to your engineers

guidelines for a reason

12 © Copyright 2017 Dell Inc.

Questions?
Realize your next steps

Attend breakout sessions Visit the CPSD booth #872

VxRail: Ensure your cluster is firing on all
cylinders with under the hood performance tuning
• Tuesday, May 9 @ 12:00–1:00
• Wednesday, May 10 @ 12:00–1:00
VxRail shields up! Confidently protecting your
mission-critical workloads with data services
• Tuesday, May 9 @ 8:30–9:30
• Thursday, May 11 @ 8:30–9:30
VxRack SDDC—VIP access deep dive
• Tuesday, May 9 @ 3:00–4:00
• Wednesday, May 10 @ 1:30 – 2:30
• Join forces with the Xpert and see if you
can make it out of the Xscape room
• Hear customer presentations in
the theater and talk to Xperts
Get hands-on
• Visit the hands-on labs and
test drive VxRail for yourself
• Chance to demo VMware Cloud
Foundation in the HOL lobby, too

14 © Copyright 2017 Dell Inc.