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back to article Inside Acadia: the Cisco, EMC, VMware love child explained

As El Reg reported earlier Tuesday, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware announced a partnership to peddle integrated server, storage, and networking stacks to data centers that want to buy preconfigured and integrated x64 servers running VMware's vSphere 4.0 software. Cisco and EMC had already let the cat out of the bag before the …

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  1. Nate Amsden

    what a steal

    Those prices look like one would expect from that group of companies. I'm sure others could come in at far less than half the cost. IMO the whole value prop of fancy management stuff really isn't realized until you have a bigger scale, the scales mentioned in these blocks seem really small(physical server count at least), yet the price tag for the blocks seem really big. If the price of fancy management software is that much of a premium, I'd rather do it myself, I may spend an extra 15 minutes on it BFD.

    Also illustrates how the V-MAX can't scale down, they can't sell you a cost effective system that can start smaller and scale up to meet the needs its a full rip & replace. Pretty typical too.

    Surprised that they opted to use rack mount servers at all, I mean how much does the blade chassis cost anyways?(HP's at least, not much). I would think it would be better to be more "unified" and have a single scalable solution that uses the same parts from the low end to the high end(just more of them), they are "blocks" after all right?

    It also seems that the vblock design sort of falls apart when you get beyond one block, I mean I certainly hope they aren't "forced" to dedicate a single V-MAX to a mere 64 blades, that thing should be able to handle 600 blades, or maybe even 1000. What I'm trying to say is once you get beyond the first one your mostly just adding more blades at that point, you have one base "block". It doesn't sound like they thought it out too well(big surprise).

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  2. Robert Amleth
    FAIL

    Open? WTF?

    "Tucci said all three companies would continue to sell their menu of products, but the Vblock offerings were akin to a prix fixe menu without any substitutions. This is the definition of openness that these three companies are using. Openness does not mean running Hyper-V or XenServer hypervisors on Vblocks, it does not mean using NetApp or Hewlett-Packard storage on Vblocks, and so on."

    So, in short, openness means nothing of the kind. It is a complete BS statement used to generate buzz.

    Unfu$%ingveliable.

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  3. Man Mountain

    Doesn't sound very 'blocky' to me!

    Silly me thought that the whole point of this type of architecture was that it was modular and scalable - I expected a smaller, almost commoditised building block that could create an architecture that could be easily scaled by adding more of the same building blocks. Low cost, granular, scalable, etc. This seems like you pretty much have to buy the finished article on day 1, or at least know which of the 3 silos you are ultimately going to fall into and buy into that range! Create an architecture that works for the small companies but can scale to handle big companies - that's what HP and IBM seem to be focusing on but typical Cisco and EMC only interested in the big bucks customers.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    hahahahahahahaha

    anyone who opts for this should be fired on the spot for going for the least cost effective solution on the market. However, I expect that this will have some level of success because there's a sucker born every minute.

    Seriously....

    Cisco - expensive servers. Do we realy expect Cisco to get close to the price of Dell, or even HP ?

    Cisco - networking. Cisco's own proprietary version of Ethernet, incredibly expensive Nexus switch range. Vendor lock-in.

    EMC - expensive storage. - building clouds on Symmetrix is absurd - and proprietary

    Vmware - expensive virtualization. Where's Hyper-V and Xen - lower cost alternaitves with sufficient functionality to accomplish this.

    There are lower cost options here, which will not require channel margins or a boat load of expensive 'services' to plumb this all together.

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  5. multipharious

    Discount

    @hahaha AC

    Let the competition begin...prices will fall. Do try to keep up with simple economics. Perhaps a Symmetrix is exactly what some customers might want to move towards virtualizing a large part of their data center, or maybe a specific portion. The way I read it the customer could choose more than one of a certain type of Block at the performance point they need. And don't forget with this model the whole thing can be discounted to be more competitive.

    You can keep laughing, but it is hard to argue that VMware sucks...or Cisco...or EMC. So you cannot exactly expect them to give it away. I am interested to see how this is going to shake out. HP has already answered... Who is next?

    That my friend is competition, and that favors customers not vendors...

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