VCE: mid market play for the Enterprise?

VMWare, Cisco and EMC announced the VCE coalition today. It is a great move which can deliver value to the customer. The question is which customer?

Typically vertical integration of layers into an easy to use and consume package has been the mantra for selling solutions to mid-market or small workgroups. For larger enterprises this has not worked. Also most of such packages in the past have been focused on ease of use and simplifying management.

VCE just by the power it packs looks more like an enterprise offering. Usually the challenge in doing this for the enterprise is that the high end its is very difficult to characterize the input or standardize the parameters, thus fix the output in any meaningful fashion. V-Blocks will answer the question: for this workload we have tested, here are the performance numbers. The question is whether it is representative workload. I have not met a fortune 1000 database administrator yet, who will agree that his workload can be templatized.

Also I think Acadia is a mistake. One thing that Citrix mastered from a channel point of view is product should be simple enough for the channel to install it, complicated enough that the customer can’t do it themselves. This enables the channel to make some high margin money and thus promote the product. Cisco would have been better off having the likes of Accenture or Infosys stand up with them with v-Blocks being an area of competence. Maybe thats the plan.

vmworld 2009: cisco ucs

It was amazing to see the Cisco ucs racks powering the 37000 VMs used for labs etc at vmworld. Before seeing the hardware it was not really clear to me, what is the UCS stuff, and why is Cisco doing this.

I learnt two things, first that Cisco for the first time in their history was not getting invited to data center deals! Thats shocking. The customer behavior has changed when they are building data centers, they are buying things by the rack, not server by server. So if you bought a rack from HP it was HP’s choice what switches and storage they put in it, and since HP oem’ed something else, Cisco was not getting invited. So this is as much a defensive move as it is an offensive move from cisco. It has also has implications on M&A as you would expect that storage would go the same way.

It still wires and hardware right? Well my other learning was that the sever is now an XML file! yes if you think that the PCI bus has been extended and now connects from a blade to a switch, as do the ethernet and storage ports. You can give a XML description which will translate into commands to the switches and can give you a server on the fly. If the switching is good enough you would not know the difference.