Welcome to vBlock Type 2

Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have noticed some big announcements come out from Cisco, EMC and VMware around their new alliance, the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition.

Interesting to see the new name. If you take the first letters it spells out VCE which could stand for VMware, Cisco and EMC. Of course that is not the kind of message that VMware want to be sending so its a good idea not to have it named after the companies.

It was nice to be named and shamed by Chad Sakac as one of the first vBlock adopters on the planet. This is closely linked to being the FCS (first customer ship) for UCS world wide.

I generally don't like posting anything related to my employer (the legal team scare me) but as I am just repeating what has already been publicly stated I am probably safe.

I note what Chad stated.

I’m also glad finally to be able to start talking openly – you should have seen the edits that occured to the VMworld 2009 VMware/Cisco/EMC supersession (SS5240 – which you can watch here) to tiptoe around this (if you do watch it now knowing what we’ve been working on – it’s interesting).

I remember seeing some of these edits and can attest to just how much care was given to this. Here is the slide from that VMworld session that also refers to our VCE customer reference story.

Also nice to be playing with the top end of the vBlock scale, with the Type 2. The Type 2 is described as the "target is very large enterprise and service providers- with a very large degree of horizontal scaling – for customers with 3000+ VMs). You can see a 3D model of the Type 2 Vblock here." This is what the model looks like but its not that realistic. Its a little undersized, add a few racks of some high end switching gear to this. Plus this is only your starting point before you begin to scale out.

As a consumer of this technology whilst at the same time being a seller of this and other vendor products I think Scott's comments are very valid. These commercial elements are very complicated and positions need to be carefully worked through.

My only comment would be this is early days people. I am sure the coalition will do all they can to accelerate development and deployment. However as someone who is knee deep in this stuff, let me just say that the technologies we are dealing with here are non-trivial, especially at scale (sort of the whole purpose behind the vBlock idea in the first place, to remove as much of this as possible). It would be wrong for you to have the expectation to whip out your credit card and get a new data center or Cloud offering up and running any time soon. The rocket has lunched but its a little way off a moon landing yet.

Exciting times and great to be a part of it.

Rodos

Disclaimer : Remember all opinions and statements are my own and relate it no way to my employer who will deny anything.