We’re seeing lots of ink (old school I know but
I think of pixels as ink) about Private Cloud.
Lots of opinion and some reality.
You may even hear words like “tectonic shift in IT”, which makes you
wonder if the hype meter isn’t turned up a bit too high.
I heard a colleague today relate info from a recent market study showing "cloud" as one of the most irritating words cited by customers.
Perhaps. But call it what you like, something very different is absolutely underway.
So, Cloud. EMC is in the thick of it and so am I. And I am especially happy that it really does relate to my interest in energy efficiency and overall sustainability.
In the simplest terms, if Cloud becomes the broad reality of IT, we’ll use less stuff. Less energy, less raw material, manufacturing, packaging, transportation and disposal of old stuff. We will also have more time. That’s the promise at least, because more low-touch / no-touch services pretty much take care of themselves.
I wouldn’t worry though. There will still be lots to do. Just different realms to do it in.
For now though I am spending time explaining our view of Private Cloud and working with our partners so they know what we are doing and how that fits with what they and our mutual customers gain from it.
Seems too much is made of precise cloud definitions. I think of it this way:
Private Cloud: Fully virtualized, efficient, flexible, easily accessible, and reliable IT
available as a service. It flexibly spans internal and external cloud infrastructure, presenting a seamless, managed cloud to the business with IT fully in control.
I recently heard an EMC executive give his simple view of the progression customers would generally follow in their “journey to the Private Cloud”. It strikes me as simple but not simplistic. In essence, there are three phases:
Phase One: Virtualize as much as possible. Gain immediate payback in capital expense reduction and improved IT flexibility.
Phase Two: Integrate applications and optimize for rapid deployment of low-touch / no-touch on-demand services. Gain immediate payback in operating expense reduction and improved ease-of-use.
Phase Three: Integrate with service providers: the federated cloud. Gain improved business agility, increased operational optimization and reduced costs.
Now there is more to it than this and there will certainly be variations on the theme but I think this is a pretty good framework.
Now the next question customers or partners typically ask is “How do we get started?”
Mostly, the answer is “Depends upon what you want to do, how fast you want to do it and how.”
It almost certainly means working with multiple vendors, each with their own view of the cloud. And that’s where the value of VCE becomes pretty clear.
VCE
The elevator pitch is: VMware, Cisco and EMC (VCE) have combined their industry leading products and expertise to simplify and accelerate implementation of private cloud infrastructures.
The idea here is that the VCE Coalition enables partners to rapidly create environments their customers want. That’s predictable Private Cloud environments to deliver on the promise of choice, flexibility and assured compliance. They want reliable cloud outcomes that include increased agility and quality of service with reduced risk and downtime.
VCE also set up Acadia, a joint venture of the coalition, to offer Vblock Infrastructure Packages through a unique model that constitutes a fast on-ramp. Acadia is there to smoothly enable the success of VCE partners in providing their customers with private cloud infrastructures based on the Vblock architecture. They’ll build a new environment, provide needed support and training to get it into production and then transfer it to a customer or partner as part of an established transfer timeline.
We expect that V-Block’s unique combination of pre-tested, pre-configured capabilities, and the combined support services from EMC, VMware and Cisco, will reduce deployment and operating costs by as much as 40% in the operation and management of data center infrastructures.
System Integrators are very important in this mix. They’ll leverage VCE to enable highly virtualized application infrastructures and to more rapidly advance cloud service offerings of every type. And they can deliver now in days rather than weeks or months.
The model delivers predictable deployment, ease-of-use, and repeatability that saves labor and avoids costly mistakes. To end-user customers that means reduced cost and improved services. To SIs and partners, it means greater opportunity and profit. To EMC, Cisco and VMware it accelerates market adoption of our vision of the cloud.
So here is a simple and high level view of what Vblock offers.
VCE and Vblock 
Vblock is a validated reference architecture. That means VCE has created pre-configured and virtualized compute, network and storage building blocks. They take best-of-breed products, management and security and provide the capability for rapid deployment with a single point of contact for support services.
It’s all tested and proven, but if you have a problem, one call and all three partners are on the case.
What you get here is a platform that enables seamless extension of the virtualized environment in repeatable units of construction based on matched performance, operational characteristics and discrete power, space and cooling.
Simultaneously, it addresses the required process changes to accelerate the technology, operational and consumption models that IT needs to operate in a Private Cloud.
Any traditional application that makes sense to virtualize at scale – Exchange, Oracle, SAP etc. - is appropriate for Vblock. It’s also an ideal platform for new implementations of Virtual Desktop, self-service computing or development and test.
Now, what’s another bane of our IT existence?
How about consistent adoption and adherence to IT policies? How about having a way to track and report compliance?
What about Vblock’s policy-driven Infrastructure to solve these problems by enabling the Private Cloud through a unique templating capability? What about having a way to create a policy once and then easily save and replicate it hundreds of times?
So, now business requirements can easily translate to IT resources which are rapidly assigned according to user specification. Save time & increase application availability. Make it repeatable and compliant to IT processes. Reduce configuration error and non-compliance.
Pretty cool.
Of course security is also a central element of the Vblock architecture including built-in authentication technology and automated security templates matched to data types.
Then there is the Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM), used with one or more Vblocks. It simplifies provisioning, configuration and compliance control. It gives fault and performance management and makes it straightforward to control compute, network and storage resources across multiple Vblocks.
Vblock also incorporates automated discovery of cross-domain data center views that populate a configuration management database (CMDB) and Provide visualization of resource relationships across application, network and storage domains. Repeatable design patterns facilitate rapid deployment, integration and scalability with straightforward resource metering, reporting and utilization.
There is plenty more information available here.
This is good, but keep in mind that this is just a start.
Now we just have to think of a name for it that doesn't irritate customers.