Legacy delivery times are usually known for being slow. Buying computing, storage and network components usually take times as much as you multiply providers. vBlock products are fully engineered and delivered operational, and the VCE promise is that a vBlock is delivered less than 45 days after SOW (State of Work), which means that you have a fully working solution into your datacenter quickly. That’s not only a promise, that’s the reality.
The first step is the Logical Configuration Survey (LCS) which is done by customers, helped by architects and engineers from VCE for networking, computing, and storage needs. This phase is done after less than 21 days, and assumes it to be the initial configuration build of your vBlock. The LCS is used by VCE to factory build your vBlock, and by the pro-support team to directly key into the device to finalize the delivery and realize the final test before giving you the keys.
Improvement comes from customers who have sent many remarks for evolutions or needs to VCE. Most of them have been taken into account, and VCE introduced a lot of new features last year in their roadmap like vxBlock (with Vmware NSX), vxRack, EVO-Rail and so on.
Over the years, VCE has acquired good experience, and now the product lifecycle is completely under control. It’s now my 3rd year using vBlock products for customers like the European Space Agency, La Banque Postale, BNP Paribas, or GDF for their dedicated cloud. VCE used to cover almost all needs in education, industry, banks, and is used by many Fortune 500 companies!
No issues encountered.
As the product is fully bundled, everything is under control. Based on a well known & improved technologies vBlock components are very powerful (even listed into TPC website as the top three regarding computing!) and stable. VCE also takes care of the whole security of the solution and advertise about security issues and how to solve them.
One of the biggest challenges for VCE was the scalability because of limitations from each vendor. Actually, they introduced new vBlock technologies using xDN to allow scale out architecture (SDDC/SDN/SDS), and bypass limitation within production.
VCE have made a priority out of customer satisfaction. You got dedicated people regarding your project! It’s very efficient and valuable. The lifecycle of your product is own by defined vArchitect, vAccount Manager and so on. Definitely 9/10.
Unique entry point for supporting vBlock is very efficient! It definitely worth 9/10. Entry support Core is quite good, 8/10, and Premier support, 9/10, is really impressive!
With Core and Premier support you have one dedicated Customer Advocate for your day to day communication with VCE.
I was working a long time ago with IBM BladeCenter-H and HP-C7000 Solutions, when I discovered the Cisco UCS technology. It was fast to provision, easy to deploy, & easy to manage! I was completely seduced by UCS and began to industrialize the implementation!
So I’ve try to find the best solution working with UCS. At first it was FlexPOD with Netapp. But there wasn’t a unique support entry point and I had to go all providers to find a solution on my issue that was a waste of time & money. Finding a fully bundled solution with engineering and unique support was really attractive!
The Initial setup is done in the VCE factory following the LCS document. VCE assume the D&I (Deployment & Installation) of the vBlock and also the lifecycle of their product. It’s very simple, you fill in the LCS, get it validate by the VCE build team and that’s it! 45 days later (and possibly before), you get your vBlock fully operational installed into you datacenter.
Deployments are done by VCE directly.
I don’t have a clear view on financial stuff but I can bring some clues. In traditional companies, you have a silo organization of each team. That means that the technical designers, engineering, and implementation teams in each domain that's SAN/LAN/SYSTEM/COMPUTE. So for each of them you have an expert on their domain. Meaning you have at least nine full time guy’s working on designing and building the solution, and in time there' an understanding of each others constraints.
Legacy built architecture disappeared with VCE converged infrastructure. Only one guy with transversal knowledge can achieve the LCS. That results in a strong and powerful infrastructure with nearly no downtime, and this is well known by the VCE technical support.
That doesn’t means that the technical guys are going to lose their job, they just need to acquire an in-depth knowledge of vBlock technologies because they have to run the platform, and adjust it regarding the company needs.
vBlock can appear as something very costly as first, but settle everything together - man/day, end customer satisfaction, delivery time - and you can figure out it’s a real win-win solution.
I was using mainly HP and IBM technologies (over 1000 physical blades), and I’ve also tested Dell blades as well. None of them were simple to use without prior implementation of tools to administrate the solution (OpenManage/HP Insight).
Some of them like Nutanix do not fit our needs and can still be a blackbox. I can’t go into detail, but hyperconverged infrastructure was not a good choice for our deployment specific needs. You can’t scale out computing regarding storage (a Nutanix node is bundled) or simply build bare metal blade for specific use (Oracle RAC for example).
I’ve looked for a long time at white papers and success stories on Nutanix regarding large scale VDI deployment (+40K) and did not find something relevant. With VCE I was able to have everything on a simple vBlock. IaaS as standard, VDI with XtremIO, Linux Oracle on Bare Metal, and the whole solution is fully supported by VCE.
VCE was created through a coalition between VMware, Cisco and EMC in 2009. The idea is to deliver a built-in converged solution based on various IT standards:
vBlock is fully engineered & tested by the company. One of the most valuable is the support which is centralized and done by VCE directly with these partners. The products cover small offices, branch offices, medium and large companies.
VCE have a specialized learning path for partners, Partner Mentorship, within the EMC education portal, and since 2014, VCE has also had a dedicated certification path which is quite similar but more accurate and technical.
In case you have not heard, the joint initiative (JV) founded in the fall of 2009 between Intel VMware Cisco and EMC called VCE had a change of ownership today.
Well, kind of…
For those not familiar or who need a recap, VCE was created to create converged server, storage I/O networking hardware and software solutions combing technologies from its investors resulting in solutions called vBlocks.
The major investors were Cisco who provides the converged servers and I/O networking along with associated management tools as well as EMC who provides the storage systems along with their associated management tools. Minority investors include VMware (who is majority owned by EMC) who provides the server virtualization aka software defined data center management tools and Intel whose’s processor chip technologies are used in the vBlocks. What has changed from Zen (e.g. yesterday or in the past) and now is that Cisco has sold the majority (they are retaining about 10%) of its investment ownership in VCE to EMC. Learn more about VCE, their solutions and valueware in this post here (VCE revisited, now and Zen).
EMC pulling VCE in-house which should prop up its own internal sales figures by perhaps a few billion USDs within a year or so (if not sooner) is not as appealing to activists investors who want results now such as selling off parts of the company (e.g. EMC, VMware or other assets) or the entire company.
However EMC has been under pressure from activist shareholder Elliot Management to divest or sell-off portions of this business such as VMware so that the investors (including the activist) can make more money. For example there have been the recent stories about EMC looking to sell or merge with the likes of HP (who is now buying back shares and splitting up its own business) among others which certainly must make the activist investors happy.
However to the activist investors who want to see things sold to make money they are not happy with EMC off buying or investing it appears.
Via Bloomberg
“The last thing on investors’ minds is the future of VCE,” Daniel Ives, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets, wrote in a note today. “EMC has a fire in its house right now and the company appears focused on painting its bedroom (e.g. VCE), while the Street wants a resolution on the strategic ownership situation sooner rather than later.”
Note that EMC has organized itself into a federation that consists of EMC Information Infrastructure (EMCII) or what you might know a traditional EMC based storage and related software solutions, VMware, Pivotal and RSA. Also note that each of those federated companies have their own CEO as well as have holdings or ownership of other companies. However all report to a common federated leadership aka EMC. Thus when you hear EMC that could mean depending on the context the federation mother ship which controls the individual companies, or it could also be used to refer to EMCII aka the traditional EMC. Click here to learn more about the EMC federation.
Looking beyond near-term or quick gains, EMC could be simply doing something others do to take ownership and control over certain things while reducing complexities associated with joint initiatives. For example with EMC and Cisco in a close partnership with VCE, both parties have been free to explore and take part in other joint initiatives such as Cisco with EMC competitors NetApp, HDS among others. Otoh EMC partners with Arista for networking, not to mention via VMware acquired virtual network or software defined network Nicira now called NSX.
EMC is also in a partnership with Lenovo for developing servers to be used by EMC for various platforms to support storage, data and information services while shifting the lower-end SMB storage offerings such as Iomega to the Lenovo channel.
Note that Lenovo is in the process of absorbing the IBM xSeries (e.g. x86 based) business unit that started closing earlier in October (will take several months to completely close in all countries around the world). For its part Cisco is also partnering with hyper-converged solution provider Simplivity while EMC has announced its statement of direction to bring to market its own hyper-converged platform by end of the year. For those not familiar, Hyper-converged solutions are simply the next evolution of converged or pre-bundled turnkey systems (some of you might have just had a Dejavu moment) that today tend to be targeted for SMBs and ROBOs however used for targeted applications such as VDI in larger environments.
IF EMC is about to release as it has made statement of direction statements of a hyper-converged solution by year-end to compete head-on with those from Nutanix, Simplivity and Tintri as well as perhaps to a lesser extent VMwares EVO:Rail, by having more control over VCE means reducing if not eliminating complexity around vBlocks which are Cisco based with EMC storage vs. what ever EMC brings to market for hyper-converged. In the past under the VCE initiatives storage was limited to EMC and servers along with networking from Cisco, hypervisors from VMware, however what happens in the future remains to be seen.
Tough to say as EMC can not afford to have its sales force lose focus on its traditional core products while ramping up other business, however, the EMC direct and partner teams want and need to keep up account control which means gaining market share and footprint in those accounts.
This also means EMC needs to find ways to take cost out of the sales and marketing process where possible to streamline which perhaps brining VCE will help do.
Will this perhaps give the EMC direct and partner sales teams a new carrot or incentive to promote converged and hyper-converged at the cost of other competitors or incumbents? Perhaps, lets see what happens in the coming weeks.
In a nut shell, IMHO EMC is doing a couple of things here one of which is cleaning up some ownership in JVs to give it self more control, as well as options for doing other business transactions (mergers and acquisitions (M&A), sales or divestiture’s, new joint initiatives, etc). Then there is streamline its business from decision-making to quickly respond to new opportunities as well as routes to markets and other activities (e.g. removing complexity and cost vs. simply cutting cost).
Does this signal the prelude to something else? Perhaps, we know that EMC has made a statement of direction about hyper-converged which with VCE now more under EMC control, perhaps we will see more options from under the VCE umbrella both for lower-end and entry SMB as well as SME and large enterprise organizations.
They are going to make noise as long as they can continue to make more money or get what they want. Publicly I would be shocked if the activist investors were not making statements that EMC should be selling assets not buying or investing.
On the other hand, any smart investor, financial or other analyst should see though the fog of what this relatively simple transaction means in terms of EMC getting further control of its future.
Of course the question will stay does EMC remain in control of its current federation of EMC, VMware, Pivotal, RSA along each of their respective holdings, does EMC doe a block buster merger, divestiture or acquisition?
Some things to keep an eye on:
![Vblock [EOL] Logo](https://images.peerspot.com/image/upload/c_scale,dpr_3.0,f_auto,q_100,w_80/nb70b5ansummme9cc5q5ymwyalbv.png)
![Vblock [EOL] Logo](https://images.peerspot.com/image/upload/c_scale,dpr_3.0,f_auto,q_100,w_30/nb70b5ansummme9cc5q5ymwyalbv.png){kind=small}
Well written and well argued!