Yesterday the twitterverse was filled with Vblock talk from some of the top people in the industry. That coupled with me getting out of Vblock week is what really sparked this post.
Vblock week was a gathering of #Team04, which included a handful of new vSpecialists but a majority crowd of vArchitects. The week was filled with talks from our fearless leader, Trey Layton, a lot of UCS cramming from Scott Lowe, getting our hands on UIM, getting more familiar with VMware View, knowing the offerings from RSA, and deep diving into Symmetrix and VMAX from David Robertson. This post isn’t geared at the technical offerings, the goal is to make you see the “true value” in Vblock.
A Vblock is a best of breed technologies union that enables a consumption of resources which we call cloud. If you are the techie person that wants to pick apart a Vblock and get into RAID levels or UCS blade configs, that’s awesome, but that’s not what Vblock is about. Picture the Vblock as a whole, not a combination of products, but a single SKU that can provide a cloud solution. Are you getting the picture yet? Let’s dive a bit deeper.
It’s been said before, “Can’t I just build my own Vblock?”, well no, you can’t. We’ve all pursued the route of building private cloud infrastructures at one point or another and we all succeeded, but to what effort? We spend weeks upon weeks researching different vendors for storage and compute, after that initial research period is done, then we are handed off to a partner who then starts pricing out what we think is needed. At this point we are relying on our own keen ability to read into how many IOPS and compute power our infrastructure demands. Great, let’s get everything on order. Another two weeks pass by while we are waiting for shipments, then the boxes finally come. Yipee, time to unload everything, rack it up, cable it all together, perhaps install new firmware on devices, then we start testing all our connectivity. Yet this is even more time we 
have tacked on to our bill. Have you been keeping up? Everything up to this point can account for nearly 3 months of your time. Have I lofted a softball yet? This is one of the best aspects about a Vblock purchase. Since this is a single SKU product, you sign the paper and everything takes just a few short weeks until a nice big package arrives at your corporate doorstep. The Vblock is unpackaged and everything inside of it has been racked, stacked, and cabled. In addition to that, engineers have tested all the firmware updates on every piece so you know that not only do you have the latest and greatest, but it’s guaranteed to work, interoperable.
Let’s just say you did decide to build your own private cloud solution. I’m sure you took into account your SAP instance or (insert any Tier 1 application) or View deployment for performance of IOPS and compute. We really won’t know how well we did in sizing our build until we get the software installed and start migrating over users as a proof of concept (POC). I would hope that POCs go well and then we can deploy our instances into full blown productions. How well did we account for vertical scalability? This is where we may experience problems, but we won’t know for sure until it’s too late. At this point, where can we point the finger? The storage company? The reseller? Ourselves? Oh yeah, how much time have you wasted doing your POC instead of being able to take everything into production right away? The less time we spend doing POCs and running production loads is a greater business value. Another great value of Vblock is the partnership between many application vendors that are standing in line to have their software certified to run on Vblock. Not only run, but be able to scale with the highest level of performance. So what are we really asking here? Vblock is the answer to the simple questions, “I need to run (insert Tier 1 
app)” or “I need a 5000 seat VDI deployment”. The Solutions team is responsible for not only testing applications, but fine-tuning them to run with peak performance. With proven results from the Solutions Team, a Vblock solution is configured by a vArchitect and delivered to the customer. Take Aaron Delp’s PC vs MAC argument. The value added here is that Vblock is like a Mac where it “just works”. Other ways to look at this come from two of my newest colleagues Jay Cuthrell and Richard Burrows. Jay wants you to envision your goal as a bridge that will allows cars to traverse a roadblock. What’s the best way to reach our goal? Do we buy bags of Quickcrete and start pouring down the cement, or do we purchase pre-stressed concrete slabs as our building block? Richard takes a different approach and looks at it as automobile manufacturing. Would you rather try to build your own Ferrari or buy it factory built? In the end, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing properly, and having it done by someone who knows what they're doing, and has ironed out all the potential kinks in the process.
Another product that makes Vblock a win is Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM). Even though UIM is in it’s early stages, it is the orchestration piece of Vblock. UIM is your single pane of glass when it comes to UCS and EMC storage configuration, deployment, management, monitoring, and automation. I can’t really give this tool the justice it deserves, so I’ll let you do your own digging.
One last piece of Vblock goodness is being first to market. VMware, Cisco, and EMC have some of the best products out today. VCE will be hands on with the newest products from all three of these parent companies and can certify compatibility on Day 0. A truly innovative way to give customers the bleeding edge they need to stay ahead of the game in a single SKU. Vblock is not a reference architecture, but a product that will deliver.