Major Moves by Infrastructure Vendors

 

Cisco Systems Inc. along with EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. announced the formation of a virtual computing environment coalition and joint venture called Acadia. Meanwhile, IBM Corp. unveiled a new release of its XIV storage product and a promotion on Power System cores.

Focal Points:

• Cisco, EMC and VMware unveiled a new joint venture, Acadia, to sell data center products and services using virtualization technology. The virtual computing environment coalition announcement enhances the companies existing relationship – VMware's primary corporate owners are EMC, a majority owner, and Cisco, which has a 1.6 percent state in the software vendor. The coalition was created to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures, according to the companies. With the introduction of Vblock Infrastructure Packages, the Virtual Computing Environment coalition will provide customers with a fundamentally better approach to streamlining and optimizing IT strategies around private clouds. Acadia will be the tactical services organization that gets the virtual environment up and running. Acadia will initially be staffed with 130 people from the three vendors when the joint venture becomes operational in January 2010.
• Vblock Infrastructure Packages are fully integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow infrastructure packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware with end-to-end vendor accountability, officials claim. The entry Vblock 0 configuration, which is not shipping until the end of 2009 or early 2010, is designed for small and medium businesses with modest server and storage needs. It will use Cisco's C-Series rack servers and is intended to support from 300 to 800 virtual machines, according to company officials. The Vblock includes the vSphere 4.0 software - with VMware's ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor - the Nexus 1000V virtual switch from Cisco that runs inside an ESX Server VM, and EMC's Celerra storage arrays. This configuration is expected to be pricing in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The midrange Vblock 1 configuration is intended to support from 800 to 3,000 virtual machines and is based on the B-Series blade servers with Clariion CX4 arrays. Pricing will range from $1 million to $2.8 million. The high-end Vblock 2 configuration doubles up the server configuration and includes Symmetrix V-Max storage. This setup is intended to support 3,000 to 6,000 virtual machines and will carry a price tag that starts at around $6 million.
• IBM unveiled an upgrade to its XIV offerings, XIV 10.2. The new features are asynchronous mirroring, instant space reclamation, non-disruptive upgrade from 10.1, enhanced VMware support, SMI-S 1.2 certification, Tivoli Storage Flashcopy Manager 2.1 integration, and an improved host attachment kit. Async mirroring is available for an unlimited number of mirrors per system, allows for bi-directional mirroring, and has user-controlled recovery point objective (RPO) scheduling. XIV storage system supports Symantec Corp.'s Storage Foundation Thin Reclamation API, enabling integration with Symantec's Veritas File System (VxFS). The new host attachment kit 1.5 supports Microsoft Corp.'s Windows multipath MPIO management and iSCSI CHAP support. XIV is also certified for VMware for ESX Servers 3.5 and 4.0 on vSphere 4 and works with VMware's Site Recovery Manager. In other IBM news, the company is offering Power Systems capacity upgrade on demand (CUoD) processor activation discount promotions. To be eligible, users have to have the servers in place and running by October 27^th. The deal applies to System i, System p, or Power System servers. Discounts range between 30 and 60 percent for core activation. The offer runs through December 29, 2009.

Experton Group believes Cisco continues to shift its revenue stream from the shrinking networking market (caused by virtualization) to alternative solutions that can help them weather the markets. The company hopes the nascent cloud computing solutions and management services sectors will give it an opportunity for expansion and provide it with a competitive advantage. However, the vendor will struggle to convince most large scale companies that it should be a preferred vendor for private cloud or server products and services. Experton Group expects Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and IBM to contain Cisco's expansion. Meanwhile, IBM has successfully built a market for its XIV product line. It has already sold more than 1,000 units during its first year of roll-out, with 70 percent of those units connected to other vendors' servers. XIV arrays are inexpensive tier 1 an 2 storage devices, especially when the management component is included. Experton Group believes the XIV product line will help IBM penetrate further into the SMB market – especially into accounts where it has had limited successes in the past.  IT executives looking for private cloud providers should insist that vendors provide shrink-wrapped offerings including integration with legacy systems and assistance with architecting internal cloud solutions. IT executives with qualified IBM Power servers should evaluate the CUoD activation promotion value proposition and, if applicable and desirable, should determine if IBM will also assist in financing the activation to make the deal even sweeter.