Cisco Partnerships Accelerate Data Center Convergence

Cisco, EMC and VMware, three of the industry's largest platform vendors, are introducing pre-packaged virtual environments in the hopes of consolidating their lofty positions in the virtualization market and extending them to the cloud.

The new offering, which is being called the Vblock Infrastructure Packages, is a set of pre-configured server, storage and virtualization management tools sold as a private cloud infrastructure. The packages currently come in three flavors tailored for different market segments, but can be modified by customers after purchase.

Rather than attempting a three-pronged assault on the data center on-premise, the vendors are offering the package as part of a cloud environment, albeit a private cloud, which they define as a "virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. It can be managed either by that organization or a third party, and it can exist on or off premises or in combination."

The idea, according to the vendors, is to help customers jump-start their access to an IT infrastructure that can help them reduce cost and increase efficiency immediately, which is critical in today's difficult environment but may require major restructuring of how IT organizations operate.

Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, said customers "need to be able to shift more of their IT budgets to the development and rapid implementation of new technologies that help their organizations create differentiated business advantages."

According to Cisco, early customer trials of Vblock Infrastructure Packages have delivered up to 40 percent reductions in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures.

In addition to server technology from Cisco, storage from EMC, and virtualization technology from VMware, the packages include security and IT management technologies from EMC subsidiaries RSA and Ionix, respectively. Given the close relationship between the vendors, particularly between VMware and majority shareholder EMC, it's not surprising that that they would create a joint sales program for their complementary parts. The package is also a boon to Cisco, which has yet to show much traction for the Unified Computing System (UCS) it introduced earlier this year.

The three flavors of Vblock include:

• Vblock 1, a mid-sized configuration designed for consolidation and optimization initiatives, supporting from 800 to 3,000 virtual machines. It includes Cisco’s UCS, Nexus 1000v series switches and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC’s CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere virtualization platform.
• Vblock 2, a high-end configuration supporting 3,000-6,000 virtual machines and designed for large-scale and "green field" virtualization. It includes EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage and vSphere.
• Vblock 0 will be an entry-level configuration available in 2010, supporting between 300 and 800 virtual machines.

Also today, EMC introduced its IonixTM Unified Infrastructure Manager as an integrated, unified element manager for Vblock, designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles.