Starting with a vision

It was years ago when I was introduced to, and witnessed challenges associated with deploying infrastructure in large organizations. For the end users, the merits of open systems seemed two fold:

1. expect vendors to interoperate with each other – for the greater good of the consumer, and
2. assume i.e. expect an implied nature of having to engage in integration upon delivery – yourself (or with an army of consultants)

The first is a function of time. The second is a function of cost.  Because time is money, one would think that ultimately they would be non-orthogonal and converge.

Interestingly, the computer industry, while arguably cyclical, has been slowly marching toward a point of tighter multi-vendor integration. From large monolithic mainframe-class systems to Best of Breed systems to systems that are engineered for specific application stacks and, more recently, to systems that tackle the challenges ascribed to the two points above.  Specifically, challenges associated with a sequential order of business involved in deploying systems for business consumption. Examples of that are too well known and felt all across the organization, i.e. the silo’ed approach institutionalized as a function of multiple vendors pitching their own wares is something that we’ve all been conditioned to expect.  And in order to satisfy our expectations, many of the vendors have been walking a fine line between collaboration and co-opetition in terms of providing a functional management and compliance reporting layer.  A combination of recognized time-proven datacenter technology leaders, EMC and Cisco, along with investments from Intel and VMware, have joined forces to form VCE to manufacture Vblock® Systems. With its history rooted in late 2009, and with over US$1B in revenues last fiscal year, VCE is an increasingly dominating player that is turning heads across industries, delivering a portfolio of uniquely engineered systems to drive agility and transform enterprises.

Based on its survey of customers and the industry, Gartner (in its recent report), recognized VCE as the market share leader in integrated infrastructure systems, ala its Magic Quadrant (see below). One of the many reasons for that is directly related to the topic at hand — the cross-stack management software called VCE Vision Intelligent Operations — which provides converged lifecycle management operations across infrastructure such as compute, network, storage — including information on the Release Certification Matrix and compliance reporting.

For more information about VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software, check out this datasheet and a quick 2 minute video:

 

Have experience with VCE Vblock Systems? Would love to hear your stories.

Thanks for stopping by!

 

 

Tags: cisco, converged infrastructure, emc, vblock, VCE, vision, vmware