Category Cisco

I remember in the early days of UCS, the competitive question on the table was “I don’t see why I’d want to do this, noone is using it” and I also imagine to hear that echoed here today.

So, who DOES think that this whole VCE coalition is a good idea? Is anyone willing to put their name against it? (Other than the CEO’s of 3 of the largest and best of breed innovative companies on the planet?)

Certainly, Steven Tally – CTO of Purdue University wouldn’t go on record saying:

“Purdue is a research university and the majority of our IT needs are spent on high-performance computing, which requires strong computing, massive amounts of storage, and high-speed networking fabric,” said Steven Tally, CTO of Purdue University.  “The Vblock solution offers these elements in a single pre-tested, pre-integrated solution which will be easier to deploy.  VMware, Cisco, and EMC are ideal partners to respond to this problem because they offer complementary tool sets and have a history of delivering good products in the market space.  When these solutions are tied together in a coherent and systematic way, it is very good news for an environment like Purdue.”

I mean, frankly that’d be ridiculous! That’s  because no one is obviously using this ‘untested’ ‘untrained’ and certainly ‘unplanned’ initiative of aligning three worldclass businesses together around efforts to improve the experience in data centers and making the private cloud a reality?   I frankly know of many other businesses leveraging VCE, as well as many getting ready to sign off on it, and thus I will not share that information until I have something external to reference on it (I do like keeping my job, kthx! ;))

Today was the big day! The launch of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, also known as the VCE Initiative!

CNN Broke the news as far as the link to the Webinar would go, with announcements being made by:
John Chambers, chairman and CEO for Cisco
Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO for EMC Corp
Paul Maritz, president and CEO for VMware

There has been a lot of chatter about this, over the weekend and even moreso leading into this announcement, with some highlights:

The launch of Privatecloud.com is only the beginning in the mass of places to find out information and content on this amazing initative.

VCE Beats out IBM with Melbourne IT

Cisco and EMC, Together with VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures

In unveiling the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers. Acadia’s unique “build, operate, transfer” model for delivering the Vblock architecture, addressing people, process and technology, will offer customers further choice, flexibility and cost advantages as they seek to virtualize their IT infrastructures and evolve to private cloud environments. In addition to Cisco and EMC as the lead investors, the build-out of Acadia’s expanded capabilities in 2010 has also been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel. Because the Vblock architecture relies heavily on Intel Xeon® processors and other Intel data center technology, Intel will join the Acadia effort as a minority investor to facilitate and accelerate customer adoption of the latest Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.

Cisco, EMC, and VMware join hands and plunge into cloud: Acadia, the power of three

In fact, many partners – both systems integrators, and service providers have all started lining up behind Vblocks.    Here are just a few examples:

Most of the vCloud Express launch partners are using the VCE coalition, and want to move forward with a formal Vblock model.   Examples are Terremark, Alphawest, Savvis, Orange and SunGard. (Thanks for this Chad!)

Virtual Compute Environment – an insider’s take.

Virtual Compute Environment – Vblock Partner Ecosystem

Virtual Compute Announcement – Integrated Sales/Service/Support

Virtual Compute Environment – Solutions Venture and Investment

Virtual Compute Environment – Technology Innovations

Also, looks like there is some Twitter presence too! So, represent! @privatecloudcom

Today, is quite an exciting day, and while all of this is high level, I’d be glad to go into much more depth about this – something I’m sure many of those linked and referenced here can say and do the same.   This is not intended to be a tutorial, but an advisory of what’s new, where to go, and I’ll have separate blog posts to go into the details :) It’s an exciting day! :)

Here I am, at TechEdNA09, walking around the Partner part of the floor and I come across the Cisco Booth “Hey, want to play our game? Just answer a few questions and you could win a Flip Mino Ultra Camera!”  I’m always game, for well, playing a game so I definitely took the opportunity to try to play.   For those of you not familiar with this game, it’s a basic touch screen of a question and 4 selections (A, B, C, D) you have to choose from.

Once you press continue the game starts, and you’re off!   Well, it took me 7 seconds (Yes, 7 seconds, because I’m an idiot! But I’m only an idiot once, and for a VERY short amount of time)  but seriously, it took me 7 seconds to decide “oh, I should hit the ABCD at the bottom and not the ones on the actual questions! Oh well, hey I’m tired! Leave me alone!) all that.. in 7secs ;)

So, I answer begin going through the questions at this point… Yay! answer, answer answer, wow look at all that Cisco Marketing Value Add proposition, UCS Value? Total rock! Got that!

(It’s a good thing I got my Ph,D. in inferred marketing knowledge, understanding of how questions are typically written, and I teach “how to answer questions” classes ;)

So, 26 seconds after my little ‘wtf where do I press’  hiccup, I finish the game.

Immediately after I finish the game the person running the game said “zOMFG! That’s the fastest anyone has done it” I’m paraphrasing a little bit here ;)

She says my chances of winning are fairly high… that’s cool, taking that into consideration and the fact that I’m already here I say the most expected thing you’d want in a booth as a vendor “Hey, since I’m likely to win this, tell me about your UCS value add!”

And here is where the fatal words come about, “Oh, err, sorry.  I’m just a booth babe!”

DoH!   Many discussions ensued around this during the week because apparently, I expect more of the people in the booths “Hey, there’s an attractive woman working in a high tech booth, they must know their product pretty solid to be there”.  Yes, I do make that assumption and will continue to make that assumption (high-tech is hot?! :))

Ofcourse, when it is clearly obvious I tend to not be ‘confused’ (there was a booth run by women in cocktail dresses? I don’t remember the product, because well, I’d rather talk to people who give off the impression of knowing their stuffs? k thx bye!)

Fortunately, every other booth I encountered run by beautiful women happened to be deeply technical and could discuss not only the product at a high level, but dive into the weeds with the best of them.   (If you were fortunate to meet up with the intelligent “babes” like those representing Accusoft Pegasus, AT&T DevCentral and  DevExpress you benefited intellectually for the better!)

Disclaimer: I do not ever refer to the term ‘babes’ outside of quotes, unless I’m talking about that movie with the pig, or somehow am strangely referring to a small group of extremely small children.  But I had to fit it within the scope of the “Booth Babe” phenomenon which I frankly was oblivious to, because I find that Women in Technology tend to be extremely accomplished and typically well distinguished.

The lesson I hope you take away from this is, assume intelligence and beauty over just chalking it up to a booth babe and the “Is there a man I can talk to?” as it’s rather demeaning not only to the individual, but to all women who invest in themselves and their futures.

We are  fortunate, that beauty and brains are simply a natural mixture :)

If there’s one thing about TechEd in my experience (Apparently, my experience isn’t everyones experience.. infact, I’m not sure ANYONE else experiences this ;)) is that it is a whirlwind adventure of constantly being on the run, on the go, and occasionally… getting heckled by the competition (Erk, can I call that ‘product’ competition? We don’t sell Laptops and Dell doesn’t sell storage [snicker ;)] :)

I like business cards, as they’re a good way to stay in touch with people you’ve met, definitely, right? Oh and Twitter, that’s good for it too.     But what if you don’t have any business cards? (ran out on the 1st day;)) I adopted the model of taking a photo of you and your badge.. Win?!

Because I wouldn’t want to publish anyone’s image and name without their permission, I’ll instead give you this one! (and this lovely story.. strangely retold many times throughout the show by others ;))

Meet mr Dell Guy, I didn’t catch his name (too blurry) but he definitely caught that I work for a competitor (Hey, I’m here as an attendee!) was my common response when assaulted! Even though I did have a number of lengthy and high quality NetApp related conversations, I had just as many good quality Education and Community conversations too.   But you don’t care about that! You care about the heckling! :)

Being at the front of the line, literally in the front as a drawing is called is always a good way to find out if you’re a winner, or… if you’re going to be publicly called out on.   Oh and a competitor being mic’d to a large crowd yelling out NetApp every other word, perhaps that is just good times. ;)

For what it is worth, I did not win the laptop they were giving away (Which mr Dell did say “You can’t win!”) as I scoff being a mere ‘attendee’ :)  Although if you’re interested I did win Flip Mino Ultra from Cisco (Notice Cisco in the background) – I’ll discuss that later in another story ;)

I wish I had more time to get around and enter into drawings or try to win mega-big prizes, but it was not in the cards.. I barely could pack all the swag I DID end up taking home, so no harm no foul! :)

Dell apparently sat back yesterday, watched all of the Cisco UCS announcements, and then said “I only see what I want to see” and apparently, all Dell sees is a Blade Server. Doh!

In this article Cisco Blade Server Misses the Mark Rick Be from Dell had the following to say:

17 March , 02:00 PM

Virtualization is undoubtedly a hot topic in the industry, especially today. After much anticipation, Cisco finally announced its “Project California.” As expected, Cisco launched its Unified Computing System (UCS), a blade server appliance designed for virtualization.

There has been a lot of discussion about what this means for Cisco’s partners in the virtualization server market. Are we partners? Are we competitors? Yes and yes. Dell continues to have a strategic networking partnership with Cisco to provide comprehensive solutions to our customers – today’s news does not change this.  Am I worried that Cisco’s new appliance will take away business from Dell? Not at all.

We’ve seen this before. Companies bring to market solutions that address a narrow population of customers or a single IT issue. While Cisco is a leader in the networking space, the server market is a very different ball game. CIOs aren’t looking for proprietary, appliance-like products like UCS because they drive up TCO and create more complexity. This is where Cisco has missed the mark.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the excitement about virtualization that Cisco’s news has generated is great. This is a technology that has revolutionized business computing and I am particularly passionate about it. It seems, however, that Cisco is a bit confused about what customers want and need from virtualization solutions.

When I am talking with customers, there are common themes that come up about what businesses want:

• Options and open standards – Flexibility is key to long term survival in today’s economy and this is what Dell delivers better than anyone else. Companies need more from a supplier than specialized, high-priced solutions. Businesses are looking for the whole package – a technology partner that can help them address and manage their large data sets, edge of the network workloads and everything else.
• Better total cost of ownership – Customers expect that innovation in IT will be focused on lowering the cost of operations WITHOUT significantly raising the price for the hardware.
• Simple management – Customers need the ability to manage their hardware locally. This is not possible with HP’s Virtual Connect –unless you have a 100% HP data center. And it does not appear to be possible with Cisco blades.

Dell’s strategy to simplify IT resonates with CIOs because it helps their organizations reclaim the most valued business resources: people, time and money. You will see exciting news from Dell in the coming months. Soon, we will introduce our totally redesigned Nehalem-based 11^th Generation PowerEdge virtualization servers. And you will also see us expand out partnerships to offer even more options for business looking to build open, flexible and powerful virtualized environments. Stay tuned.

I absolutely agree Flexibility is key for long-term survival, and reliability is paramount for survival period.    Look no further than Cisco for an example of what reliability is while establishing what open standards are, and how they’ll be pioneered and delivered upon.   It will be Cisco’s story in the future than when you think of Virtualization, you will think of Cisco and their significant role in the Datacenter and beyond.