By: VCE CTO Trey Layton at EMC World 2013 (@treylayton)
Greek philosopher, Heraclitus said “change is the only constant in life.” And without question, change is the lifeblood to our industry and like any transition, albeit from VHS to digital, from board games to mobile apps, or even dare I say it, Tom and Jerry to Jerry Springer, the “customer” conversation takes on a new shape, with new questions and a fresh dialogue.
Today, we’re seeing something very similar with a natural transition towards convergence in the data center market. No longer is the conversation about the impact on IT departments, but about how to influence change to meet the business needs of the company. Refocusing an entire business around a common goal is no easy feat, especially within those longer standing companies with more traditional, more siloed approaches to their business – and as such skill sets are once again going to have to change or people will find their options becoming limited. Like the technology they’re going to have to adjust; it’s a natural transition for not only the IT department, but leaders across multiple faculties of the business.
Economic and competitive pressures are demanding we do more with fewer resources. Take Columbia Sportswear who deployed Vblock systems in order to transform IT to be much more service orientated in order to fulfill business requests that much faster. Rapid deployment and ease of use also enabled Columbia to redirect IT staff to find new ways to solve business problems, rather than focused on the IT “plumbing”. Above all, the need for flexibility is commonplace in today’s business environment and hence require their IT to “never say no” regardless of the project that comes through the door.
VCE is leading the charge into the next generation data center, simplifying and accelerating data center modernization efforts for our customers. Simply put, VCE represents the next evolution of IT, one focused on the next generation data center and the future of cloud computing.
So where do we go from here?
As the IT industry and the needs of the customer continue to evolve, so will VCE and the Vblock systems. Already we’ve taken our Vblock family to the next level by enhancing the existing 300 and 700 systems and expanded our portfolio by adding the 100 and 200 systems. We also developed Vblock Specialized Systems that are optimized for SAP HANA software and added our own layer of intelligence to existing management toolsets by creating VCE Vision Intelligent Operations to enable and simplify converged operations.
As we look to the future we will continue to innovate on top of the success we’ve already seen to ensure converged infrastructure retains its position as the foundation for next generation data centers. And trust me, there’s a lot more coming to you this year, including the notion of “hyper-convergence” – something you’ll hear a lot more from me on in the coming months.
Join us at this year’s EMC World in Las Vegas to experience for yourself the simplicity behind the Vblock converged systems and see what the future holds for the next generation data center.
The Transaction Processing Performance Council today announced its fifth international Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (TPCTC 2013). I’ve the great privilege of chairing TPCTC series since 2009. This year’s conference will be collocated with the 39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2013) on August 26, 2013 in Riva del Garda, Italy. With this conference we are encouraging researchers and industry experts to submit ideas and methodologies in performance evaluation, measurement and characterization. Additional information on TPCTC 2013 is available online at http://www.tpc.org/tpctc/tpctc2013/.
A new white paper from IDC discusses how converged infrastructure solutions from Cisco and EMC, through VCE, can enable IT organizations to deploy a highly virtualized, highly efficient computing infrastructure. For those new to the converged systems topic, VCE was formed by Cisco and EMC to build converged infrastructure systems that dramatically reduce the complexity that would otherwise be required to bring together technology components.
IDC highlights that the data center is changing and IT companies are adopting standards in hardware and software that will allow the entire infrastructure to be operated and managed more easily. IDC states that if standardization, flexibility, and simplification are not already top priorities for an organization, then complexity and inefficiencies can emerge as chief drivers of operational costs. To prove this point, IDC conducted platform migration studies in 2010 and 2012 and found that more than 50% of all sites were actively working on platform migration and that each migration targeted 40% or more of legacy systems (i.e. RISC/UNIX). The drive to consolidate workloads and to reduce costs continues to accelerate.
The white paper includes profiles from companies that have recently migrated from legacy RISC/UNIX platforms to VCE Vblock™ Systems and realized significant improvements in performance and reduction in server deployment times.
The paper conclusion summarizes that converged infrastructure solutions deployed as part of a data center transformation strategy can reduce IT staff costs, maintenance and management costs, and power/cooling costs.
Nothing makes a product marketeer’s job easier than when customers send in their own video testimonials about how successful they have been using our products. Today’s video comes all the way from one of my favorite cities in the world, Buenos Aires.
Martin Cabrera and Fernando Vicens, Data Center Managers from Argentina-based service provider IPLAN share their experience with the Nexus 1000V virtual switch. Their key points are two of the things we always say about Nexus 1000V and we continually hear from our customers:
1) Nexus 1000V allows virtual network policy controls to remain with the networking team, and
2) virtual networks are easier to manage when they are a seamless part of the physical infrastructure (consistent management, visibility, etc.)
Over 200 attendees were present for the opening of two different Co-Innovate Labs (COIL) recently. The COIL is charged with accelerating co-innovation within the SAP partner ecosystem.
This lab is part of the company’s global R&D network and it offers a hands-on environment for SAP, partners and customers to work together on current and future technologies.
The Co-Innovation Lab Singapore is located at SAP’s Asia headquarters in Singapore. It joins a global network of existing co-innovation facilities in Palo Alto (California, USA), São Paulo (Brazil), Walldorf (Germany), Moscow (Russia), Bangalore (India), Shanghai (China) and Tokyo (Japan).
SAP Co-Innovation Lab Singapore is supported by key technology partners Cisco, Intel, NetApp and VMware. Each company provided its latest generation of hardware and software products to the facility’s computing centre, which operates its own private cloud as well as the SAP HANA in-memory platform.
Co-Innovation Lab Singapore has already helped Singapore-based startup ZelRealm Interactive improve their solution, said the company. They developed Sogamo to help game developers optimise and better monetise their online games. Similarly, YFind Technologies, a Singapore-based company, is collaborating with SAP R&D and SAP Co-Innovation Labs to build a product that enables mobile shopping and checkout in retail stores and creates a social network in the supply chain in order to personalise offers and sense demands from customers in real-time for upstream suppliers.
The Coil Lab in Shanghai officially opened March 5th and will server the same purpose as the others around the globe
Cisco, with its Unified Computing System Server Platform and Enterprise Networking Products, and SAP, with SAP HANA, Business Suite, Precision Retail, and Jabber integration, continue to partner in order to bring the best solutions and collaborative products to the world.
