Inside Acadia: the Cisco, EMC, VMware love child explained
A chip of the old vBlocks
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As El Reg reported earlier Tuesday, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware announced a partnership to peddle integrated server, storage, and networking stacks to data centers that want to buy preconfigured and integrated x64 servers running VMware's vSphere 4.0 software.
Cisco and EMC had already let the cat out of the bag before the big chiefs had a chance to talk to the world about a coalition the companies have established and the Acadia joint venture.
So we listened to the companies' head honchos during the official announcement for greater detail and some clarification about what Acadia is - and what it is not. Also, what precisely will be bundled into those Vblock infrastructure bundles.
John Chambers, Cisco's chief executive officer controlled the show as he tends to at these things given Cisco's market capitalization dwarfs that of EMC and VMware. Joe Tucci, EMC's president CEO and chairman, got to say a few words, as did Paul Maritz, president and CEO of EMC subsidiary VMware.
Chambers likes to wax poetic, and he said that he believed that when we all look back five years from now, we would see that the coalition between EMC and Cisco was a pivotal moment for data centers. IT vendors are always saying things like this, of course.
After ribbing Tucci about only giving Cisco a few per cent stake in VMware, Cisco's commander said customers of EMC and Cisco alike had been asking for them to offer a more integrated setup for virtualized server and storage. Customers, in a "not too gentle nudge," Chambers said, have been telling them if they just integrated the components, they would buy more. And hence, with Vblock infrastructure stacks, they are doing just that.
But, Chambers said, he knows the history of the IT market. "Most strategic coalitions have a higher degree of failure than acquisitions," he admitted, and later in the call he said that acquisitions were only successful about 10 per cent of the time.
But this coalition - formally known as the Virtual Computing Environment coalition and that is not the same thing as the Acadia joint venture - different. Why? Because because of the 20-year relationship between Tucci and Chambers, and the partnership between Cisco and EMC - as well as VMware.
And after all the presentations were done, Tucci made the same point about a coalition being inevitable. "You show me the one company that can do this by itself," Tucci said. "So you have to form coalitions."
Cisco, EMC, and VMware know the VUE coalition cannot be the only way to buy the hardware and software that the companies peddle for profit, and they have no intention of only selling their products collectively through a quasi-united sales effort.
Tucci said all three companies would continue to sell their menu of products, but the Vblock offerings were akin to a prix fixe menu without any substitutions. This is the definition of openness that these three companies are using. Openness does not mean running Hyper-V or XenServer hypervisors on Vblocks, it does not mean using NetApp or Hewlett-Packard storage on Vblocks, and so on.
COMMENTS
Discount
@hahaha AC
Let the competition begin...prices will fall. Do try to keep up with simple economics. Perhaps a Symmetrix is exactly what some customers might want to move towards virtualizing a large part of their data center, or maybe a specific portion. The way I read it the customer could choose more than one of a certain type of Block at the performance point they need. And don't forget with this model the whole thing can be discounted to be more competitive.
You can keep laughing, but it is hard to argue that VMware sucks...or Cisco...or EMC. So you cannot exactly expect them to give it away. I am interested to see how this is going to shake out. HP has already answered... Who is next?
That my friend is competition, and that favors customers not vendors...
hahahahahahahaha
anyone who opts for this should be fired on the spot for going for the least cost effective solution on the market. However, I expect that this will have some level of success because there's a sucker born every minute.
Seriously....
Cisco - expensive servers. Do we realy expect Cisco to get close to the price of Dell, or even HP ?
Cisco - networking. Cisco's own proprietary version of Ethernet, incredibly expensive Nexus switch range. Vendor lock-in.
EMC - expensive storage. - building clouds on Symmetrix is absurd - and proprietary
Vmware - expensive virtualization. Where's Hyper-V and Xen - lower cost alternaitves with sufficient functionality to accomplish this.
There are lower cost options here, which will not require channel margins or a boat load of expensive 'services' to plumb this all together.
Open? WTF?
"Tucci said all three companies would continue to sell their menu of products, but the Vblock offerings were akin to a prix fixe menu without any substitutions. This is the definition of openness that these three companies are using. Openness does not mean running Hyper-V or XenServer hypervisors on Vblocks, it does not mean using NetApp or Hewlett-Packard storage on Vblocks, and so on."
So, in short, openness means nothing of the kind. It is a complete BS statement used to generate buzz.
Unfu$%ingveliable.
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