EMC and VMWare's coming together with Cisco is an exercise in Utility. If we take Nick Carr's analogy of comparing utility computing with the power-generation industry, what the VCE alliance could be said to be is an attempt to define a de-facto standard for the 'compute unit'. An attempt even to define what voltage the Cloud should run at.
This is not necessarily a bad thing and there will come a time when we do need a standard for the 'compute unit'; even a de-facto unit isn't necessarily a bad thing. De-facto standards happen all the time; the processor has almost become a de-facto standard in that of the Intel chip, the desk-top operating system standard is pretty much Windows (and this from a Linux/MacOS fan).
Around these 'standards'; an industry has been built and thrives. And where there are standards in computing, there are dissenting voices and where there are dissenting voices, little industries spring and thrive in their niche.
But considering where we are in the development of cloud computing and especially, the infrastructure as a service play; arguably this is a bold and a very risky play. Much of what is being offered is at least behind the scenes, the proverbial swan; 'graceful and elegant on the top, with little legs paddling like mad'. Perhaps this is why that this coming together is in the form of a services company? It's just too hard for a currently over-worked IT department to make the technology play nice together?
Martin-
I’ve read all the UCS info (including the project california book Cisco published), and my first impression is that this is one of those A for idea, F for execution type of products.
– It’s extremely proprietary, requiring all cisco gear with the exception of the storage.
– Their sell on how complicated the solutions UCS replaces are way overblown (I personally have plenty of customers that leverage HP, IBM or Dell blades for VMware via iscsi and have none of the management headaches that Cisco describes). Their solution completely hinges on FC (and FCoE) remaining the storage standard for VMware. I think the market has shown the future for VMWare storage is iSCSI or NFS. Why not just used 10GBE then? No CNA or UCS needed.
– All management of the UCS solution is through the network devices- Cisco can’t even get centralized management of their own devices right (ciscoworks anyone?) and they’re going to manage servers too?
As for this goofy ‘v-block initiative’ I don’t fault EMC, I’m sure they’ll make a few sales from it before it fizzles out. The thought being ‘companies buy end-to-end solutions from HP, Dell, and IBM, for UCS to succeed we must offer the same thing.’
The problem is the market has changed. Companies are assembling best-of-breed solutions, lowering their TCO against the perceived benefits of ‘one throat to choke.’ EMC and NetApp have thrived against these monolithic IT vendors- why would anyone expect people to go back to the single vendor approach?