EMC and Cisco announced their Virtual Computing Environment Coalition today with the goal of accelerating the move to virtualization and private clouds. This has been one of the industry's worst kept secret for several months, with wild rumors circulating about what it would and would not be.
Like most of these multi-company alliances, the reality has not lived up to the hype. The Joint Venture that was supposed to compete with HP or IBM to sell full stack solutions of servers, networks, storage, virtualization, and services has devolved into a reference architecture called V-block (that you build by buying the components separately from the three companies), some high profile marketing, cooperative support (who doesn't cooperate with their partners to support customers?), and a scaled-back JV that will build and operate a v-block based solution for you as long as they get to transfer it somewhere pretty quickly. I am sure everyone involved was disappointed.
This is good for Cisco because they get ushered in to EMC's installed base to sell UCS. It is not clear that EMC gets much from this since UCS has no installed base at this point, and nothing about this announcement increases EMC's competitiveness in storage for virtual servers. VMware is part of this because EMC needed their brand presence to give the solution credibility, but VMware is keeping a low profile to avoid angering their two largest customers - HP and IBM.
I just can't figure out if it is a good thing for any particular class of customer. For someone who wants to turn over decisions about the technologies they use and how they put it together, this might be a fit. But those customers most likely already have a trusted integrator or else they are well on their way to eliminating the bulk of the infrastructure and moving to IT as a Service anyway. For customers who are interested in best-of-breed technology choices and want someone to help them integrate them, this is a non-starter. The v-block architecture v-blocks you from any choices that are not UCS servers, Nexus Switches, EMC storage, and VMware. Even if you do like that combination of technologies, you don't need this coalition to acquire them and deploy them. Perhaps the Acadia Services JV might bring something that your integrator can't do, but they appear to have a very short-term BOT focus - build, operate, transfer. Where's the commitment to your success in that?
NetApp has been working with VMware for over 2 years to deploy Virtualize Data Center and private cloud infrastructure at companies like Telstra, BT, Spring, Intuit, T-Systems and others. More recently, we have been working with Cisco and VMware on Virtualized Data Centers that include the UCS and NetApp storage at companies such as Terremark. Various integrators have been involved in these programs to bring the expertise and the customer knowledge to bear to build what is not only transformative, but also efficient. None of this required a formal coalition - it was simply vendors cooperating to transform a customer's datacenter.
In all likelyhood, this initiative probably just won't matter (anyone remember the ACE initiative in 1992?). All of the partners involved remain free to work with other companies that compete with another coalition partner. NetApp will continue to work with VMware and Cisco as well as Microsoft, IBM, Fujitsu and a host of other technology and integration partners. An open approach is the best one right now.
