VMware, Cisco, EMC Coalition Unveils SAP, VDI And FCoE

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.Customers get fully baked solutions which is especially critical for "risky" solutions like VDI (which have a history of having failed deployments) and SAP (mission critical), he says. VCE is also the only one to offer a fully integrated FCoE solution.

"HP and IBM have FCoE in the server, NetApp has FCoE in the storage, but the Vblock solution is the only turnkey solution that brings full end-to-end FCoE.  FCoE is still early in customer deployment, but this solution helps."

Miniman says VCE is not only pushing its data-center solutions, but also helping its principals. "There is cross-product promotion which benefits VMware, Cisco and EMC product sales beyond what is sold in Vblocks."

Looking ahead, VCE is promising a regular product roll-out every quarter. They are already in the labs building solutions for test and development applications, business intelligence and data warehousing, as well as vertical and horizontal applications for financial services, health care, energy and local, state and federal governments.