Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) for Service Providers
Hello again – I thought it’s a good time for another post on the SP data-center.
You might have already seen the announcement regarding the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE). We believe this is wonderful news for our customers and partners; and represents an unprecedented collaboration between three highly regarded leaders in the IT industry: Cisco, EMC with VMware.
This coalition was created to increase customers’ business agility – specifically, through greater enterprise IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.
We define a private cloud as a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. Private clouds can be managed either by that organization or by a third party (e.g. a service provider), and that it can be housed either on or off of the organization’s premises - or in combination. Private clouds allow enterprise customers to rapidly use a virtual IT infrastructure.
By now the benefits of the private cloud computing concept are probably becoming evident to you: better control and security than today’s data center with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs from virtualization. Stated another way, if your business needs multiple IT services – you no longer need to consider the challenges of assembling your own hosting/support/provisioning, management tool complexities, planning equipment for future growth, etc. as the first option – because you now have access to a pre-tested and pre-integrated private cloud model.
The VCE coalition makes great sense for businesses for another reason too. According to various estimates (including a McKinsey and Company estimate, Cisco estimates and the VMware Fortune 1000 Customers Study) about half of the $350 billion spent annually on data center technology infrastructure and services is for capital expenses; while the other half is for operating expenses. Sliced another way, about 70% of total costs are attributable to maintaining existing infrastructure leaving only 30% or less for new technology initiatives and applications which can actually provide break-through differentiation for businesses. The ability to rapidly put in a place a private cloud infrastructure (either on premises or managed by a service provider) will enable you to simply and rapidly achieve the benefits of virtualization, without the complexity of assembling all the elements yourself.
Another element of this announcement is that of Vblock TM Infrastructure Packages. These packages are fully integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow infrastructure packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware with end-to-end vendor support. As a result of the VCE model, organizations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor support.
The coalition will scale customer adoption of Vblock systems by enabling a global community of systems integrators, service providers, channel partners, and independent software vendors (ISVs). The coalition has also established unified presales, professional services and support capabilities to simplify customer support.
Service providers can use the Vblock design for private clouds for their enterprise customers; for their internal IT needs; or as a building block in their service delivery architecture (e.g. Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery) for SP public clouds
Finally, Cisco and EMC have also announced the creation of a joint-venture – Acadia. Acadia’s focus will be on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers with the option of ‘build, operate and transfer’ to accelerate private clouds.
For you as a service provider, what will be the greatest benefit of the VCE coalition?
Posted by Simon Aspinall at 11:55AM PST
Cisco Around the Web