Cisco and EMC's VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) Coalition, cofunded by VMware and Intel, has announced the latest evolution of its Vblock platform, including SAP, VMware and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) enhancements. Through Vblock, VCE (www.vce.com) is delivering what it calls the industry's first completely integrated IT offering, pre-integrated and tested product suites that combine virtualization, server, networking, storage, management and security technologies.
The Vblock Powered Solution for SAP has been in the works for more than a year. VCE says they can significantly reduce customers' cost footprint to run SAP, enabling customers to more easily transition their applications to a virtual environment running on Vblock. According to a VMS study, SAP on Vblock customers can achieve savings of between 19-26 percent on hardware/software investment, implementation, and upgrade costs in large enterprise environments.
Unlike the SAP solution, the desktop virtualization opportunity is more greenfield, says VCE. Customers are looking for a faster, risk-adverse ways to move to virtual desktops, and the Vblock Powered suite for VMware View 4.5 will enable them to accelerate virtual desktop deployment. Users can add more VDIs by moving to larger or adding more Vblock Infrastructure Packages.
In addition to announcing fully tested and certified end-to-end FCoE capabilities, VCE also announced that Vblock now supports automated storage tiering, and the EMC PowerPath V/E for intelligent path routing and optimized load balancing across all configurations of the Vblock platform. It also introduced the B250/B440 and the B230 UCS blades.
Stuart Miniman, principal research contributor, The Wikibon Project, says VCE has beaten the industry to the punch with the first turnkey solution of end-to-end Ethernet with FCoE, and together with the certified VDI and SAP solutions add significantly to the promise of converged infrastructure in regards to making IT more flexible for the end-user and cost-effective for the business.
