FAQ on Virtual Computing Environment
Cisco’s recent announcement of the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition received quite a lot of buzz in the media and social web. So we got Gary Moore, Cisco’s SVP of Advanced Services, and Chuck Hollis, EMC’s Global Marketing CTO, to address some of our most frequently asked questions.
They answer the following:
1) How does Virtual Computing Environment Coalition affect Cisco’s UCS offering? How does Vblock differ from UCS?
2) How will the Coalition help to deliver benefits to smaller companies?
3) What applications will be the best targets to move from private to the public cloud?
4) How will the vBlock technology integrate with existing data centers such as backup, SAN infrastructures, etc.? How will vBlock management resources interact with existing in-house management tools?
5) How will the Coalition offer a truly unified support service for Cisco/EMC/VMware infrastructure without putting another layer between the customer and the three vendors? How will the Coalition fit into the partner ecosystem?
1) How does Virtual Computing Environment Coalition affect Cisco’s UCS offering? How does Vblock differ from UCS?
Moore: Vblock Infrastructure Packages deliver the complete private cloud value proposition for our customers and enhances the value of Cisco Unified Computing along with EMC and VMware solutions. By combining these best-of-breed networking, compute, storage, security and management with end-to-end vendor accountability, Vblock supports the broadest range of operating systems (24) and applications (over 300) that enables customers to rapidly migrate existing applications to Vblock as part of a re-hosting.
Hollis: UCS is advanced unified compute and network. It’s an important piece of the offer, but more is needed. UCS forms the heart (along with other technologies from VMware and EMC) to form a Vblock – an integrated “appliance” for virtualization at scale.
Just to be clear, customers and partners can use UCS with other storage, other hypervisors, other management and security stacks – just like most industry-standard servers. For customers and partners that want the complete and integrated package, Vblock will be very attractive.
Moore: It’s also important to point out that although we designed the Vblock to offer strong value to our customers, Cisco, EMC and VMware always strives to provide our customers with choice, and we will continue to work with other technology vendors to develop solutions that meet our customer’s needs.
2) How will the Coalition help to deliver benefits to smaller companies?
Hollis: I suppose it revolves around what one might mean by “smaller”.
For companies that have dedicated IT functions of several individuals, the VCE coalition delivers roughly the same benefits it delivers to larger companies: next generation computing paradigm, integrated customer experience, and so on. You’ll see future iterations of the technology that do a better job of reaching these environments before too long.
If the question revolves around companies that are smaller than that, our expectation is that – over time – these organizations will turn to qualified service providers and other partners that provide IT services using the VCE approach.
Moore: The Vblock roadmap includes in 2010 the Vblock 0, a preconfigured Vblock Infrastructure Package that will bring the benefits of private clouds within reach of medium-sized businesses for the first time. Further Vblock Infrastructure Packages will be developed to serve business needs across three categories: shared services, applications and vertical industry solutions.
3) What applications will be the best targets to move from private to the public cloud?
Moore: For the customers I speak with, we are seeing a trend to more business critical applications transferring into the private cloud as they begin their journey to the cloud. The Vblock Infrastructure Packages enable partners and customers to both customize and extend the Vblock platform to address specific application, solution or industry needs using an open-standards based management and integration framework to meet specific application or organizational needs.
Hollis: The focus of VCE is on private clouds, and not public ones. Private clouds are different in that IT retains control over service levels, security and other important functions, in addition to having a clear migration path for existing candidate applications. Private clouds also offer choice as to whether you use internal resources, external resources, or any combination.
By comparison, the best candidates for moving applications to a public cloud would be applications where (a) IT is not concerned about having control over service levels, security and related functions, (b) application developers are comfortable re-targeting their application for a specific public cloud environment (i.e. Amazon), and (c) there is no desire to move workloads internally/externally, or between compatible service providers.
4) How will the vBlock technology integrate with existing data centers such as backup, SAN infrastructures, etc.? How will vBlock management resources interact with existing in-house management tools?
Moore: Vblock enables the rapid migration of applications and operating systems from physical to virtual infrastructure. This enables the automation of IT processes to provide replicable, auditable IT processes that enable rapid deployment of new applications, or rapid assignment of IT resources to meet business goals while ensuring that security, performance and compliance objectives are met. By exposing these IT processes as abstracted self-service templates, Vblocks deliver private cloud capabilities that enables organizations the flexibility and choice to consume IT as a service, while maintaining the governance, security and SLA control that IT needs.
Hollis: Vblock represents a new choice – a “clean sheet of paper” for infrastructure design and management. In exchange for that, it offers unprecedented levels of resource and operational efficiency.
Some customers will find that attractive, others will want to incrementally introduce the underlying technologies into their legacy environment. In some sense, it becomes a question of how fast you want to get to good.
On the question of management, the de-facto element manager for Vblock (EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager) presents itself as a “managed element” to other frameworks customers might be using: Tivoli, CA, BMC, etc.
5) How will the Coalition offer a truly unified support service for Cisco/EMC/VMware infrastructure without putting another layer between the customer and the three vendors? How will the Coalition fit into the partner ecosystem?
Moore: The Virtual Computing Environment coalition has committed to unify customer engagement with investments spanning dedicated pre-sales, professional services and single support experience to provide a seamless, end-to-end customer and partner experience.
- The coalition Solution Support Team is a cross-company presales team, fully trained in all elements of Vblock architecture and go-to-market resources to work with customers and partners and to facilitate engagements.
- Virtual Computing Environment coalition professional services, jointly developed and delivered, will help customers to understand how to maximize value and speed time to solution. These offers include: the Cloud-based Business Advisory Service, Private Cloud Strategic Impact Advisory Service, Private Cloud Architecture Impact Advisory Service, Cloud Computing Strategy Service, and Vblock Design and Implementation Service.
- The VCE coalition companies will undertake in-depth cross training and investments in joint problem re-creation labs as well as integrated processes and best practices for rapid problem resolution with a single point of accountability.
These services are founded on the industry leading expertise of over 5000 Professionals in 120 countries, as well as an enabled partner ecosystem, with experience advising IT organizations across the Fortune 500 & Global 1000. Together they leverage proven methodologies, tools, and processes to provide end-to-end data center transformation experience in the areas of Virtualization, Unified Computing, Networking, Storage infrastructure design and management, Operations - people, process and automation, Comprehensive education services and Business process consulting.
Hollis: What we’ve build around customer support isn’t another layer, it’s an integration of existing capabilities. Simply put, call any one of us, you’ve called all three of us. If a customer prefers to interact directly with deep support resources at the individual companies (as is often the case), that’s still available. On the other hand, if a customer wants a more integrated support experience (i.e. one throat to choke), that’s now available as well.
Regarding the partner ecosystem, I think it’s fair to point out that all three companies (VMware, Cisco and EMC) derive a majority of their revenues by working with partners of every flavor: resellers, integrators, consultants, service providers and more. Indeed, we’ve constructed all aspects of the VCE coalition around partner enablement – and that’s not up for debate.
Posted by John Earnhardt at 01:57PM PST
Peric Nov 5, 2009
Thanks for this FAQ, was really useful.