A Few Quick Thoughts on the VCE Coalition Announcement

Great observations, Scott. I think this is just yet ANOTHER marketing ploy to put a pretty bow around something that is already being done. Is there a “new product” being introduced here - no. Is there a new technology being introduced here - no. It’s the same software/hardware/storage that has been available for the past 10 months just bundled together to make it appeal to customers who want something simple.

I can see this pushing Dell/IBM etc. into investing more into a competing, well integrated, lower cost combo venture with their blades running HyperV/Xen/KVM and their own incumbent storage platforms (Equalogic, EVA etc.) - MS have a good story in joined up management from virtual OS - hypervisor in SCVMM and there are a number of add-on products from people like Veeam that compliment this.

HP - who knows where they go, given no love lost to Cisco? they are still a “premium” quality product over Dell/IBM but they’re not going to be left out in the cold.

Maybe Arcadia will be the gold plated DC in a box, but there will always be room in the market for a cheaper “good-enough for you” brand solution. (Armani vs. Wal-mart?)

You raised great points about competition. Something that’s not be noted so far is customer experience with support from the vendor(s) (outside of the benefits of competition for the consumer). Based on recent work on a VMware/HP installation, I found that there were more than enough finger pointing between vendors during some of the problems we had along the way. VMware always came through eventually, even when it seemed clear that it was HP that was at fault. Overall VMware was most helpful, but there were times that, as a customer, I was caught in the middle.

I hope that it goes better than the attempt to integrate with vendors, the way that I was led to believe that ESXi (or one of the several other brand names - basically ESX on a USB stick) was supposed to, during VMworld 2007. It was promoted as a solution that was closely developed with HP and Dell. My experience (such as IRQ sharing) did not validate that integration.

Perhaps a central entity for customers to go for support when the integration doesn’t work out as expected would be a good idea. Being a Mac user, I’ve come to find that having it all come from one place makes my support issues go much more smoothly than they ever did with Windows-based computers. However, I understand that without competition, there will be less advancement.

Well said. I don’t know why EMC would drag VMware into this. A short term gain, but VMware will loose out in the long run. EMC and Cisco could have blazed ahead with this virtualisation hardware pact and everyone would have recognized the potential for VMware as the software glue.
Also this can’t be good for VMware’s strained relationship with the likes of NetApp.

I just want to ask. Does not Dell, IBM and HP offers the full virtualization portfolio which includes not only VMware, but also their virtualization solutions, or partner solutions like the ones from Microsoft or Citrix??

I have always seen the options there, yes they are strong VMware partners, but also Microsoft, Oracle and Citrix partners.

one thing is sure: competition is good for customers, and sometimes you would need to cooperate (something that HP does not do very well at this times)

the important thing here: you need to be based on standards (does HP virtual connect do that?), you need to be open, you need to innovate.

regards
Jose Ruelas

There is a big difference between this and the usual marketing alliance insofar as they are going to try to sell the vBlock solution together. That creates a lot of logistical problems for EMC, Cisco and VMware and I suspect Acadia is being formed to solve those problems. But that doesn’t mean the problems go away because these companies don’t sell the same way and are used to sharing the wealth differently. Acadia is not likely going to make the solution less expensive seeing as how it will add overhead to the process. Maybe they should have named it vBucks.

I don’t know what Paul Maritz could have done differently. Do you really think he had a choice?

I think “Bobsta” hits the nail on the head.

My feeling is that there are more discussions about VCE than what it deserves.

Massimo.

I think what is being missed in this announcement is the Vendor Lock in of the Application Co’s (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) They charge exorbinant maintenance fees as there right and the customer is getting little to know business value for that. VMW’s new features such as storage Vmotion for example will never force any customer into complex migrations of the HW or HW vendor lock in again. However if customers begin to standardize on an infrastructure and say “This is what your application will run on and if not I am seemlessly moving to a different CRM tool” and will not incure huge Infrastucture investments to do so that is where the long term value of VMware will be. This is a HW solution that has little to do with HW and more to do with which side of the house drives the purchasing process. Infrastructure Giants vs. Application Giants. My take is this is an attempt by the largest infrastructure companies in the world putting their stake in the ground and saying standardize on the Infrastucuture and run any app you’d like. It doesn’t even have to be VCE, vBlock, etc. This is just a highly integrated version of something you can try to build on your own with different component parts. Larry Elison over at Oracle just announced an intention to have Vendor lock in from the Application to the Tape that backs it up with the Exadata II announcement! Applications have driven infrastructure investments forever and the islands of information and complexity in data centers today are a direct result of that. I think customers forget just how locked into applications they are and the annuity costs associated with the difficulty to change. Imagine a day where switching from Oracle to SAP or Outlook to Notes is as seemless and costly as switching from Netscape to Internet Explorer. That is the value of the Data Center Operating System. That is the challenge the largest tech companies in the world VMW, EMC, Cisco, HP, IBM, MSFT, Oracle, SAP, Google, Amazon etc. have in front of them. Round 1 went to IBM and the Mainframe, Round 2 went to the Application Companies. Who will win Round 3? VMW + HW / Services companies, Application Complanies, or Next Gen “Cloud” Companies in the war for control of global corporate data centers. Should be very interesting.
-Brian

Seems we’ve gone from “use case” based architectures to Vblock in one year’s time - a definite shift in message that says, “we’ve boiled it all down to VMware, UCS plus EMC storage A, B or C.” The technology and players in VCE are compelling, and doesn’t it make sense to take what are arguably the best of breed products and marry them into a ubiquitous solution block?

As a short-term play the VCE proposition (Vblock 2) sounds good for large enterprise clouds with little experience in architecting scale-out virtualization platforms. I say this because conventional wisdom is orthogonal to the disruptive technologies that create real opportunities in the market, and VCE seems to embody the pinnacle of today’s conventional wisdom. But then UCS and Vmax were designed to serve a specific type of customer, while VMware’s virtues are generally agnostic.

We all know the problem with very large building blocks: they don’t scale down, hence VCE delivers Vblock 1 with a switch to EMC CLARiiON. Likewise, Vblock 0 right-sizes storage with a switch to EMC Celerra. The common threads are vSphere, UCS, Nexus 1000v and Cisco MDS - covering 300 to 6,000 virtual machines (per Vblock). Again, this is nothing truly new for Cisco, EMC or VMware, just polish and packaged deployment of goods and services.

I’m with you, Scott, being confounded by the indirect message delivered here. On the face it is a “packaged solution” based on industry leading architectures. But - as it has been said - this could have been done without VMware’s participation in the venture. I would have liked to see an alliance with at least one other SAN, blade and fabric vendor. As it stands, VCE helps Cisco’s UCS initiative, solidifies EMC’s prowess in virtualization storage and isolates VMware in a new and potentially harmful way.

In the end, there will be plenty of market to absorb VCE. However, many will see VCE as a lock-in architecture and will resist unless compelled by market forces. Hopefully, VMware will exercise its independence and create a similar “ratified solution stack” with some other players to remain more neutral: maybe a Virtual Hardware Xceleration with VMware, HP and Xsigo - the VHX initiative…