Expert Data Labs Blog

Well – it’s a big day today  

For context – here’s the announcement, and I will also link to the recording of the 3 CEOs discussing what it is, what it isn’t, and what it means.   Here’s also a summary video from John, Joe and Paul.

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).   Specifically, the inital versions of that VMworld session called out what we were doing together around Joint Engineering, Joint Solutions, and Joint Support models.   Suffice it to say it go kiboshed by the secret police at all three companies – but we still managed to sneak in a lot of sneak peaks

IF YOU ARE a VMware/Cisco/EMC Employee (and on your intranets) – you can get more content from http://www.vceportal.com

IF YOU ARE part of the public and interested in what we’re doing on this, there is more content here http://privatecloud.com

So, now that the cat’s out of the bag – what exactly are we talking about?

The most important thing isn’t the tech (though that is very cool, and I’ll get to that in a second), or the joint Cisco/EMC/Intel venture (though everyone always focus on that because it is evidence of joint commitment) – it’s an idea.

That idea?   It’s what people who have heard people from VMware (like Paul Maritz or Steve Herrod), or Cisco (like Padmesree Warrior or Ed Bugnion) or EMC (like Joe Tucci or Chuck Hollis or myself) talk in the last year will seem very familiar:

• If you agree that x86 wins (price and price/performance – today mostly, and tomorrow almost entirely), and virtualization is the way to go – it’s possible to build infrastructure based on those assumptions in a much more standardized way, with much more cost-effective and innovative elements, and importantly – leverage VMware and VM-Aware networking, compute, and storage resources to “get out of the plumbing business”.
• This could not only saves a ton of capex dollars, just as importantly, one could get order of magnitude improvements in operational efficiency – instant self-provisioning, end-user chargeback.   This could result in interesting new business and economic proposals, where you could pay-as-you-go as opposed to up front-capex centric models – if you had vendors willing to partner with you in that way.
• It requires infrastructure not only integrated with VMware, but also designed for scale-out, so you can start small, and get as big as you want (otherwise the economic models are whacky).  Also – if you took the engineering resources of industry leaders and applied them in a very focused way against this use case – you could build something so integrated, it would in effect be a software mainframe built out of commodity elements.
• It also requires management that is deeply integrated across the stack – from the infrastructure up to the business application, and that spans the physical and virtual infrastructure.
• Heck – if you could do all that – you’d have standardized building blocks for people building internal clouds, and external clouds (either public or private)

That’s what we jointly announced today – execution against that idea – making the idea real.

To recap – there were 4 major parts of today’s announcement.  I’m going to break this up into 4 posts – one that deals with each.

1. Technology Innovations – Vblock Infrastructure Packages.  Tightly integrated standardized “building blocks”  Click HERE for more on this topic.
2. Integrated Pre-Sales, Services and Support – Vblock Unified Customer Engagement.   Engage like we’re one company, get services like we’re one company, support that is exactly like we are one company.  Click HERE for more on this topic.
3. Solutions Venture and Investment – Acadia. A Cisco-EMC (and Intel) joint venture to build, operate, and transfer Vblock infrastructure to organizations who want to accelerate their journey  Click HERE for more on this topic.
4. Partner Ecosystem Leverage – Vblock Partner Ecosystem.  Click HERE for more on this topic.

There’s huge amounts of detail on each of these things – enough for twenty blog posts (more I bet!).  We’ve been working on this for more than a year (we’ve been plowing away with “intense partnering” for many years, one year ago we got the “engage in joint partnership like nothing else” direction). 

I’m also going to write another one where I will try to answer a question I think we will get often: Where does VMware fit in the VCE Coalition – are they still independent?  The short answer is: ABSOLUTELY.   Go to the link for a more detailed dialog.