Introducing VCE Vblock Systems 720 and 340 with Cisco Nexus 9000-Series Switches – Enabling the Application Centric Infrastructure

VCE continues to build the foundation for business applications and next-generation solutions and today we introduced new Vblock Systems with Cisco Nexus 9000-Series switches that will enable enterprises and service providers to rapidly and reliably adopt Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). With this introduction, VCE further enhances business agility by enabling IT to build, deploy, secure and maintain applications through a more agile framework – to respond more quickly and efficiently to changing business needs.

Virtualized and cloud environments require more agility and simplicity to quickly deploy, migrate and maintain applications without introducing compliance, security and performance challenges.  IT organizations, on the other hand, are challenged with operational complexity, architectural rigidity and infrastructure inefficiency that result from manual processes, disjointed provisioning, static resource allocations and disruptions when growth is needed.

The good news is that VCE continues to evolve its Vblock System portfolio to deliver unsurpassed operational simplicities and enable the business and IT agility through a policy-based application management framework. Our new “ACI-ready” Vblock™ Systems offer a dramatically accelerated and low-risk path to new application and technology adoption, optimal deployment and consistent operations across virtualized and bare metal environments.  Automating the provisioning of the complete application deployment lifecycle enables business and IT agility, operational simplicity and minimized risk.

The new Vblock Systems 720 and 340 deliver:

1-  IT Agility and Operational Simplicity

VCE enables IT to respond to dynamic business environments more quickly and efficiently with the ability to deploy mission-critical business applications in hours rather than weeks through a common operational framework, automation and focused integration with leading applications. Customers can standardize, simplify and optimize application deployment, performance and operations through Vblock Systems that support Cisco ACI, while significantly reducing the need for traditional, error-prone processes associated with deployment and maintenance of IT infrastructure and applications.

  • Common Operational Framework – VCE’s common operational framework between applications, network, compute, storage, security, compliance and services enables IT to move away from a static, box-centric method of provisioning and maintaining applications.  This new operational framework provides consistency while saving time and money.
  • Automation – Vblock Systems with integrated Cisco Nexus 9000-Series switches and ACI will take full advantage of application policy-based templates that automate the provisioning of network resources, application services, security, segmentation and workload placement. This results in dramatically reduced costs, fewer errors associated with manual processes, and accelerated deployment.
  • Openness – Through open and standards-based aggregation of the functional, environmental and operational characteristics of Vblock Systems, this joint solution simplifies integration into existing and emerging management frameworks, providing a complete system configuration and health context and introducing a new level of converged operations for IT infrastructure.

2- Building the Foundation for Business Applications and Next-Generation Solutions

VCE Vblock Systems integrated with Cisco Nexus 9000-Series switches and ready for ACI enable a dynamic and flexible architecture that builds the foundation for and protects existing investments as business applications and next-generation solutions continue to expand and evolve.

  • Dynamic resource pools for business applications and next-generation solutions – Automation and management are improved through a common means of programming policy-based management to abstract the underlying network from the application deployment, enabling a resource pool to adapt to business requirements on the fly. As new applications are incorporated, rapid innovation delivering new capabilities and services are added without the need to configure individual network devices.
  • Grow as needed – Help existing VCE customers protect the value of their investments –they can deploy ACI-ready Vblock Systems with Nexus 9000-Series switches today and take advantage of ACI’s full capabilities when available. Vblock Systems can be integrated with new infrastructure driven by business application needs rather than the components themselves.
  • SAP Business Warehouse on SAP HANA – VCE Vblock Systems with ACI are an ideal use case for SAP Business Warehouse deployments SAP HANA. This demonstrates that complex, mission-critical applications can be easily deployed using a policy-based application deployment framework. This use case paves the way for inclusion of a broader set of enterprise applications including Big Data, VDI and critical business applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL and others.

3- Reduced Risk and Vblock System Assurance

VCE reduces risk and enables visibility into the system to be able to trace diagnostics, ensure compliance to system RCM and updated technology as well as compliance to set security, network, and application policies. Cisco ACI further enables automation and dynamic, common, policy-based compliance to consistently maintain policy and security from one system or application to others.

  • Application and Resources Health – Vblock Systems are designed for and customers derive the greatest benefit from deploying applications in virtualized environments.  VCE Vision™ Intelligent Operations software provides Vblock System users with insightful metrics relating to the computing, networking and storage resources consumed for each application.
  • Improved System Security: ACI provides the automation of security policy for enabling the security team to retain tight end-to-end control.  Increased reliability, security and compliance are achieved as a result of centralized and automated management of the network and applications.  The automated insertion of security services simplifies application deployment while enabling uniform policy enforcement and fewer configuration errors.
  • Reduced Risk for Application Deployments: ACI combined with Vblock Systems helps application administrators deploy and scale their applications securely and with less risk, minimizing errors. VCE’s fully documented and defined engineering process for manufacturing and sustaining Vblock Systems puts VCE in the unique position of being able to deterministically upgrade existing data center deployments with the new generation of Cisco networking infrastructure.
  • VCE Support – VCE provides a single support contact for integrated end-to-end customer support to simplify all support operations.

BOTTOM LINE…

With the latest VCE Vblock Systems 720 and 340 integrated with Cisco Nexus 9000 and ready for ACI, IT organizations can become even more agile, cost effective and efficient.  True converged infrastructure form VCE enables data centers to be more simplified, optimized and automated, significantly simplifying application deployment and migration and overall data center operations. This in return frees up IT staff to concentrate on taking care of initiatives that drive business value and increasing the organization’s bottom line.

To learn more about the new Vblock 720 and 340 Systems, please visit

Vblock 300 Family http://www.vce.com/products/vblock/system-300

Vblock 700 Family http://www.vce.com/products/vblock/system-700

About the Author: Berna Devrim