This is great from technical perspective i would really like to work at that DC

Greg great post, keep up

Niko

You’ll get over it. Plus, the fact that Cisco and VMWare has made their own reseller tells you volumes about the state of the reseller industry. The push into stacks means that the vendors intend to take all the revenue and profits, the resellers will be left with low value SME customers.

On the other hand, the whole stack thing is only temporary. Another year or two and clouds will be over and the technology will trickle down in usable form. I’m not bothered.

Great post from a technical perspective although I can’t say I agree with the subjective conclusions you come to. One important note to your update about Acadia being a servies only company, that’s no longer true. Acadia is now a qualified reseller of vBlocks and the subcomponents. They’ve also brought on an aggressive CEO with lofty revenue goals. Be interesting to watch how it all plays out from here.

Joe

If we lose the skills to integrate multiple vendors, will we end up with the mainframe / minicomputer days ? I fear so.

Well researched post as always. I am not sure I agree with all your points, but I believe @bgracely is working on something, so I’ll defer on a broader response. I do, however, want to touch on the idea of vendor lock-in–you kinda lost me there. Everything in a vBlock is available unbundled so there is no restriction to the access of the individual technologies. vBlock is also standards compliant within the vBlock so there is no secret-sauce protocol we use to do stuff that a customer cannot do for themselves. Externally, the vBlock connects to the rest of the data through standard interfaces, so if you buy one vBlock, there is nothing that technology-wise that forces you to have to buy a second or third vBlock. You also heard form Chuck Hollis, while in Boston, that there is no price premium for a vBlock vs. unbundled components. That last part may be the deal of the century–essentially, you are getting Cisco and EMC to do you systems integration, testing and validation for free. So where is the lock-in?

The fuel for the fire in Boston was the same thing you bring up: surety vs control. Different customers will find different balance points and handle different applications differently–you might want a high level of control of the infrastructure that underpins your back office systems, but be perfectly happy to put sharepoint, exchange and VDI on a vBlock. The point is customers control when/where/how they make use of vBlocks.

The key point is the one you bring up about changing how we buy IT. While you may be buying a VBlock to support your new ERP system, at the end of the day, you end up with general purpose data center infrastructure that really shifts how you maintain and operate your data center–in a good way.

Take care…

Regards,

Omar Sultan
Cisco