GEC NEWS WIREInnovative projects like Big Data has not come up strong in this region but has the incredible opportunity. So also mobility. Cloud is complicated and complex today. Deploying a private cloud is hard but VCE has got solutions which can offer the customers readymade fast track to the cloud.
“And with the launch of VxRack and Vscale architecture when VCE is moving to the next level, the competition is trying to catch up with the first level. ”
Tom O’Reilly, CTO, Africa and the Middle East, VCE
Creation of Converged Infrastructure is definitely an outcome of the emerging need of reducing rising costs of operations, enhanced productivity and enhanced agility and flexibility in the data centre. It is an approach to data centre management that relies on a specific vendor and the vendor’s partners to provide pre-configured bundles of hardware and software in a single chassis. The goal of a converged infrastructure is to minimize compatibility issues and simplify the management of servers, storage systems and network devices while reducing costs for cabling, cooling, power and floor space.
This trend at the highest level of information technology has certainly drawn a lot of investment within the traditional infrastructure vendors to address this market by bringing new products and even it has given birth to new companies. For example in 2009 a new company was born with the joint efforts of Cisco and EMC and some investment from VMware and Intel, which called itself as Virtual Computing Environment Company or VCE. Besides all the traditional infrastructure companies including IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell, NetApp, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc. brought out their own versions of converged infrastructures. However, VCE as a company quickly climbed the chart to become a leader by outperforming rest of the companies. Within two years of operation, VCE touched $1 Billion turnover, which made VCE one of the fastest-growing companies in the IT industry history. At the same time VCE sold 1,000th Vblock Systems and Gartner named VCE the leader in the integrated infrastructure segment with a commanding 57.4 percent market share. Now, after one and half years becoming a billion dollar company it well on its way to touch US$3 billion.
Tom O’Reilly, CTO, Africa and the Middle East, VCE, says, “VCE pioneered a new segment of the market with Vblock— the industry’s first completely integrated IT offering with end-to-end vendor accountability.” “VCE is the only company to engineer, manufacture, deliver and fully support its converged infrastructure offering with end-to-end multi-vendor visibility, enabling the leading time-to-market and one of the lowest total cost-of-ownership (TCO) for converged cloud infrastructure. The Vblock converged infrastructure is designed to standardize processes and product life cycle management to significantly improve application availability and help enable VCE’s seamless support experience,” he added.
The system is built in the VCE factory and shipped to the customer with pre-configuration usually within 45 days of the order. VCE takes all the works of engineering, testing, and validation of all the products that go from its stable into the datacentre not allowing customers to worry any more about the data centre.
So within a few years after the first launch of Vblock, VCE brought out various versions from system 100 to system 700 but during December last year, something unexpected happened to the company as EMC bought majority of the stake in VCE making it an EMC federation company. The result of the change in guard brought in two new products to the portfolio of VCE. So during March VxBlock and Vscale fabric in the Vscale architecture surfaced in the market, and later VxRack in the early May.
Tom says, “We are able to do some interesting things now which we have not been able to do in the past and launch of VxRack and Vscale fabric are two examples, which indicates about the direction we are traversing.”
VxRack is the most recent product announcement, which happened at EMC World 2015 at Las Vegas, during the first week of May. VCE’s first hyper-converged solution based on VMware EVO: RACK architecture, it allows the customers to look at deploying modern applications in very large scale.
He adds, “Now we have number of products to fill out the converged infrastructure or integrated systems market. We have EMC VSPEX reference architecture, then we have Vblock and VxBlock converged infrastructure, and now we have the VxRack, which is the hyper-converged rack scale. Therefore we have the portfolio that a customer may want.”
So the difference between the Vblock and VxBlock is that Vblock comes with Cisco ACI architecture whereas the other one comes with the option for the customers to choose either VMware NSX or Cisco ACI architecture, the hardware in both the systems are same and identical in nature.
Similarly, VScale is an architecture based on the Cisco Nexus 9000 networking spine and leap technologies. So it allows the customers, who may have Vblock today, to implement Vscale architecture as spine and plug the Vblock in and as they grow and scale, and need the additional resources, they do not necessarily buy another Vblock. They could buy VxRack. Even they can buy storage block if they want to enter into Big Data space or even add a compute block if want to have some high intensity graphics. So it offers the ability to have a fully architectural solution data centre, which is able to grow as the applications required. Every product available from the stable has the VCE experience of having an engineered solution that is manufactured by the company itself and delivered very quickly with single support from VCE for all the components.
From the management perspective Vscale is very interesting also as you are not only managing Vblock as a single set of resources but also you are managing your entire datacentre. He added, “Of course we sustain it. We offer formula level for the data centre which is called RCM or The VCE Release Certification Matrix, which stands out through the VxRack, VxBlock and the Vscale fabric.
How relevant is the solution for this region?
Today, the Vblock and VxBlock are built on the best of the breed hardware of Cisco server, cisco networking and EMC storage. But at the same time, VCE has started offering hyper-converged architecture – VxRack, which is built on the commodity boxes or bright boxes as called by Gartner. So it could see traction from every geography – be it North America, Europe or even Middle East or Africa. These products are relevant to every region because there is a hunger in the market for the converged products, whether it is hardware based or software based. And solutions coming from a single stable, the customers find it trust worthy as they would have single head to chop.
Tom adds, “The story we are really trying to tell here is that the infrastructure layer of the IT organizations in this region needs to be simplified because the organizations need not to focus on how the hardware components can stick together. The CIOs need to focus on the services that they are offering to the business – the ways they are offering innovation to the business and improving the way the business operates. And if they only focus on the keeping these components plugged in together, that is the waste of time. So we are simplifying that by abstracting the layer by offering the Vblock and other products.” “These products are so rock solid that they do not need much time and effort in operating and worrying about. Therefore the CIOs should focus on how to match the innovation with the growth of the business,” he added.
Secondly, in this region, the pace of growth is incredible and IT struggles to keep up with that growth if they have the traditional datacentre model. Tom explains, “When we talk to the CIOs, we talk about simplicity, agility and removing the unplanned downtime and outages. As the foundation in it is rock solid the applications can be provided to them in absolute risk-free environment. This resonates very well in this region.”
Here, the CIOs want the solutions which offers the highest resiliency. They need to worry about the solutions and making sure that the platform is working with their applications and stable as they grow the business.
Today, we find many customers in the region to have deployed SAP and SAP Hana on Vblock with great success. A lot of the customers are also trying to deploy Oracle database on Vblock in order to consolidate and reduce the number of licences, the overall cost. Another very successful case in the region is about deploying virtual desktops. Tom maintains, “Virtual desktops implementation is very tricky thing because it seems so be simple but if you have any impact on the performance, then all the users will really scream. The users of virtual desktop wants things immediately. So in this scenario Vblock have been very successful in deploying virtual desktop which offers high performance.” He added, “So the customers’ experience sometimes is better than the traditional desktops. Besides, there are many vertical applications for which Vblock is getting adopted. For example, health care application – EPAC is deployed over Vblock throughout the world.”
Therefore, the winning ratio is quite impressive in this region. Not only VCE is able to tap the green field projects but also winning the existing refresh cases.
As the industry is marching forward to adopt IOT and digitisation, as per Tom all VCE solutions are future ready. He adds, “We know that the Big Data centric applications like social, mobile and IOT require very different workloads and this is where our solutions can be right solutions.”
Gartner research says that the CEOs in the region were never positive about the technology as they are today. They have understood that they need to bring technology to the heart of the company. The companies, not matter which industry they belong to, if they do not become digital, will not be around for a long time.
The go to market of VCE is very wide in this region. Not only the company leverages its own partner networks but also leverages the partner network of EMC and Cisco because every time they sell Vblock they sell EMC storage and Cisco UCS servers and switches.
Finally…
VCE has had credible growth by focusing on the large enterprises but when it became the part of EMC federation, VCE took in the team of VSPEX, which is the SMB play from EMC. The latter’s engineering and marketing engine is within the VCE organization now. Therefore by virtue of having VSPEX reference architecture or VSPEX blue, VCE acquires the capability to address the need of small customers or the smaller needs of the large customers.
As per Tom, “As the market for converged infrastructure is growing, the competitive market scenario is also growing but VCE as a pioneer company has captured the No.1 market share from the day one.” He concluded, “The big IT companies are realizing that they may have missed it a few years ago but now they can catch up with their own solutions but there is no doubt that VCE will continue to lead this market. And with the launch of VxRack and Vscale architecture when VCE is moving to the next level, the competition is trying to catch up with the first level.”
