VCE Delivers Enterprise Clouds Today and Is Laying the Foundation to Make Them Great Tomorrow
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VCE Delivers Enterprise Clouds Today and is Laying the Foundation to Make Them Great Tomorrow Ever since Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intelannounced the formation of VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment Company, on November 3, 2009, there has been a fair amount of debate as to how VCE will operate. Many of the questions focus on what benefits VCE will deliver to enterprises now and what enterprises should ultimately expect from VCE in the future. Having recently attended the EMC Analyst Days Event in New York on January 17th and 18th, it is much clearer as to what VCE is delivering today and how it is laying the foundation to help make enterprise private clouds “Great” in the very near future. Over the last 15 or so months there has been a lot of buzz about VCE and its Vblock terminology as Vblocks are being positioned as the preferred underlying architecture for enterprise private clouds. While Vblock has been defined to contain compute, network, management, storage and virtualization resources, what has not been clear is why implementing Vblocks are so desirable nor has it been entirely clear what additional benefits that enterprises can expect to gain from Vblocks in the near future. Those questions were largely answered at this week’s EMC Analyst Days. In short, the VCE roadmap may best described as helping enterprises get from “Good to Great” in their own journey toward building the private cloud. The stage that best describes where VCE is at today in terms of delivering on the promise of enterprise private clouds is “Good.” By implementing today’s Vblock architecture,VCE immediately solves one of the more pressing but hidden and unspoken challenges that every enterprise data center faces: interoperability certification. Most enterprise data centers today support heterogeneous IT infrastructures that consist of multiple different operating systems, server and storage hardware platforms, HBAs and switches. While these environments may have resulted from a variety of customer purchasing practices and vendor portfolios that are diverse because of acquisitions, consolidations, growth, etc., they have become almost impossible for enterprise IT shops to guarantee the reliability and stability of these environments as interoperability issues between different hardware components have crept in. A prime example of where interoperability issues surface is from the constant stream of firmware and microcode releases from HBA, network, server, and storage hardware manufacturers. While most of these manufacturers make a good faith effort to do some interoperability testing and certification with other hardware vendors, it is fair to say that there is no way they can test every hardware configuration that can and does exist in end-user environments. The impact of this uneven testing methodology is that at any time when one of these manufacturers releases or updates its firmware or microcode, there is a distinct possibility that the update or release may not be compatible with a device that is already present in an enterprise’s SAN. Further, the incompatibility issue may not become evident or known by either the manufacturer or the end-user until an outage of some type occurs. These potential outages are particularly intolerable in virtualized environments as multiple VMs may be unexpectedly impacted. It is this problem that the current Vblock configuration from VCE promises to address and fix. Each Vblock is pre-tested, certified and “blessed” by VCE engineers in their labs before any of the firmware or microcode goes into a production Vblock deployment. Then as new or updated firmware and microcode revisions come out, the VCE team again tests, certifies and “blesses” this code before it again goes into production. It is important to note is that these firmware and microcode updates in a Vblock configuration may not interoperate with every piece of hardware on the market. However they will interoperate with every hardware component in a Vblock. This interoperability is all Vblock customers ultimately care about as they now have a high degree of confidence that the underlying hardware on which their virtualized infrastructure is based is reliable and stable. This helps businesses in two ways. First, their IT administrators can stop worrying about having to research and test interoperability configurations on their own as they are neither trained to do this nor does this testing offer any intrinsic value to the business. Second, businesses can become much more aggressive about growing the business and/or doing application development as they know the underlying hardware foundation upon which their virtualized infrastructure is based is sound. Just as importantly, they know that new feature uptake will be simplified and accelerated as the roadmaps for all Vblock components are interlocked and planned for rapid integration, something VCE calls “evergreen”. However I still only refer to today’s VBlock offering as “Good,” not “Great.” To get to the “Great” stage, VCE still has some integration work to do which, it admits, is not complete. However it is actively in the process of completing this integration. Right now a Vblock can almost be described as a “Vsilo.” Each Vblock supports the incremental addition of compute power, network resources or storage capacity. But once that Vblock’s limits are reached and a new Vblock is needed, there is currently no “easy” way for the old and new Vblock to share resources. Rather each Vblock is managed and treated as its own logical entity. However the news on this front is more good than bad as the VCE team is aggressively working to overcome this limitation. VCE is adding capabilities such that as new Vblocks are added, the resources of the old and new Vblocks can be managed and shared between them. Presumably, VCE is planning to leverage EMC VPLEX technology, including AccessAnywhere™ that enables data to be shared, accessed and relocated over distance, working in concert with VMware and Cisco advanced virtualization capabilities. The unique combination could allow multiple Vblocks to be managed as one while also enabling things like Vblock Non Disruptive Upgrade with no service disruption to the applications or loss of high availability during migrations. While it makes sense that VCE wouldn’t have this complete functionality on day 1, it is when this functionality is released that I see Vblocks moving from “Good” to “Great.” It is at this point that the journey to the private cloud moves from promise to reality as enterprises can begin to distribute applications and their data across multiple Vblocks with minimal or even no administrative intervention and without any form of application disruption. The arguments for Vblocks and VCE are powerful, they are real and they are about to become an integral part of the enterprise data center experience. So even though EMC last week announced VNX, software updates to VMAX and Data Domain and its new Isilon product line, the integration that the VCE team is doing between the Vblock components was the real story in my mind. By capitalizing on the latent capabilities of the components that reside inside of each Vblock, enterprises are perhaps only 12 – 18 months away from making a private cloud an enterprise reality..