Unless you live under a rock, you know that EMC’s mission is to lead our customers and partners on their journey to hybrid cloud computing. Customers have always been our top priority and providing them with choice and flexibility when it comes to building their own cloud infrastructure is rooted in the products we develop, the solutions we create, and the companies we partner with to carry out our mission.
At VMworld last week, EMC announced that, along with our longtime partner Cisco, we will provide customers with VSPEX proven infrastructure based on Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus switches. These new offerings form a critical part of EMC’s “Three paths to the cloud” strategy:
- Best of breed infrastructure components – provides customers the best technology to architect their own cloud environment and offers maximum flexibility.
- Proven infrastructure – VSPEX reference architectures are proven and documented in EMC labs and assembled by EMC global channel partners. Proven infrastructures reduce risk and accelerate time to deployment.
- Converged infrastructure – VCE VBlock is a single integrated product comprising Cisco servers and networking, EMC storage and VMware virtualization; VBlock features a single point of management, single point of support and offers both the fastest time to deployment and the lowest total cost of ownership.
A recent Wikibon article outlines the market potential of cloud infrastructure solutions. In 2011, “Legacy” (custom designed infrastructure) dominated the market. That means customers are buying piece parts and building their own solutions in-house. What’s interesting is that the Wikibon study predicts that by 2017, customers will overwhelmingly buy complete solutions via either “reference architecture” (VSPEX) or “Single SKU” (VCE Vblock) rather than having to integrate all the piece parts themselves. While not an even split, it’s clear that customers are leaning more and more towards hassle-free, easy-to-deploy solutions.
