VMware, EMC, Cisco, VCE, Intel, Acadia….whew! what does it all mean?! 

VMware, Cisco and EMC created a new marketing ploy called VCE (Virtual Compute Environment), this will provide technical innovations as well as integrated pre-sales services and support.

What is the product? vBlock.  Think of vBlock as the plug and play data-center solution, it will consist of Cisco UCS/Nexus/MDS, EMC Storage and VMware Virtualization all within a pre-designed and built rack solution - simply drop it in your data-center, plug it in and deploy virtual machines.  This is not really any different than purchasing HP Servers, NetApp Storage and VMware licenses separately. Ultimately it is the same solution, but now with a single SKU that partners will be able to sell.

I can’t say that VCE is really innovative, but it is brilliant from a business standpoint.  It will allow partners to sell a single source solution quickly and easily - no longer will VARs need to bring in multiple vendors to sell the entire design.

Click Here to Learn more about VCE from the CEO’s of Cisco, EMC and VMware.

OK, so where does Intel come into this? Well with some venture capital from Cisco, EMC and Intel a new organization called Acadia is being formed.  Acadia will bring the vCloud into the private data-center.  In a phone conversation today, Chad Sakac informed me that Acadia will provide a pay by usage solution for Enterprise users that aren’t ready for the public cloud. The solution will be completely supported and provided by Acadia and the customer will only be billed for what they use.  Pretty much a vBlock will be dropped into the customers data-center, the end-user will have a self-provisioning utility to create virtual machines and then they’ll receive a bill for actual utilization.  So no capital expense at all, your data-center now turns into a full 100% operating expense.

I didn’t plan on writing a full explanation on who/how/why. Chad Sakac covers all of these topics extremely well on his blog and I invite you to check out the following links;

VCE-An Insiders Take

VCE-Technology Innovations

VCE-Integrated Sales/Service/Support

VCE-Acadia

VCE-Partner Ecosystem

Posted under Good Reading

In a clever marketing video NetApp produced (in house), NTAP takes on DD and e2 in an 8 Mile style rap battle. This was quite entertaining, thanks for the 4 minute break from a stressful day NetApp!

Read More…

Posted under NetApp

How could this be?!  EMC, owner of VMware does not support its own product to run virtualized?  You got it daddy-o!

We are currently working on an upgrade of Documentum and we need a new home for the full-text index search module of Documentum, we asked EMC support if we can virtualize this piece, they told us no.  Reference support note 43361 and line #5 clearly states If Index Server is running on VMware, this is not supported.

I really hope someone at VMware or EMC  can collaborate on this and get it resolved.  I know that EMC recently purchased Documentum, but a top priority would be to make sure all of their products work together in harmony.

Another sad day in the vSphere for me. (no pun intended)

Posted under Good Reading, VMware