The next evolution of the Vblock System has emerged with a little help from Cisco. This version integrates the networking giant’s Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, to help developers build secure, flexible data centers that can adapt more rapidly — and with less effort — to business and app requirements as they change.
That sounds like a tall order but it’s the potential fruit that the partnership between Cisco and VCE could deliver by tapping into software-defined innovations to drive operational efficiencies. The proposed endgame: to help customers be more successful in a competitive cloud era.
Flexibility, Diversity
With this move, Tim Page, chief operating office at VCE, is making it clear that his company is committed to “supporting the customer journey to the hybrid cloud which makes the network increasingly a focal point for optimizing resource pooling and sharing across the hybrid cloud.” And Soni Jiandani, senior vice president of the Cisco Insieme Networks Business Unit, is pledging that the solution will help “lower the total cost of ownership” and drive agility.
Part of the secret sauce is automation. Centralized management and policy-based infrastructure that are in line with the changing needs of complex business apps are also in the mix. According to VCE, IT can define a policy based on what an application requires — such as compliance with security requirements and data governance mandates — with ACI on a Vblock System.
Cisco ACI on Vblock helps customers manage apps across many cloud management platforms and offers a diverse choice of security and networking services vendors, the companies said. The idea is to offer customers greater consistency whether they’re dealing with physical, virtual or container-based workloads and to offer visibility into multi-tenant and application health by leveraging telemetry.
Removing Complexity
We caught up with Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, to get his thoughts on the ACI integration. He told us this deeper partnership with Cisco is a very logical next step for VCE.
“VCE has kind of mastered Vblock, which is the combination of Cisco, EMC and VMware. ACI is becoming increasingly popular with Cisco customers. For some customers that don’t have a lot of high-level engineers, the complexity behind deployment can be quite high,” said Kerravala.“VCE’s primary value proposition is that they take all the complexity out by doing a lot of the heavy lifting for customers. It’s a good next step for VCE. It’s a logical evolution of the product. I think they will have a lot of success with it.”
Earlier this year, VCE expanded its hyper-converged Rackscale family. The VCE VxRACK system aims to help IT quickly and cost-effectively build and operate clouds that tap into the benefits of VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center offerings.
