Vblock has been in existence for just over a year now and this post is written to describe the foundational shift Vblock has taken prior to reaching it’s first birthday. When Vblock was first introduced, it was published as a Cisco, EMC & VMware reference architecture. That reference architecture was a series of Vblock Infrastructure Packages Overview and Deployment Guides. These guides were intended to provide the foundational knowledge for how to consume and assemble components that would be made into a Vblock Infrastructure package. There were several other documents made available to partners and employees describing the components and certain sizing guidelines surrounding each Vblock. Customers would work with account teams from partner and parent companies to produce a bill of materials. That bill of materials and any modifications required were analyzed and approved by VCE dedicated resources to ensure supportability and awareness of the configuration to VCE’s seamless support organization. The customer would then order equipment from a partner who would then place orders for the components from each parent company.

Equipment constituting the Vblock would arrive at the customer premise and assembly would begin by the Partner, Cisco and/or EMC Professional Services. In each case the equipment would need to be un-boxed, inventoried and staged. In staging, some components required assembly (example: inserting blades into chassis, rack mounting gear, etc..). Once each component reached a state that enabled that component to be configured, an expert with that given component would begin the process of bringing that component to a production state to serve its role within the Vblock.

This sort of “assembly on-site” is the epicenter of many problems which impact customers, partners and the ultimate success of any infrastructure deployment. Delays of equipment delivery to a customer site often require partners to deal in challenging resource scheduling gymnastics which often impact partner services profitability. In many cases the services resource must learn how to configure in real-time or the requirements for the particular deployment require a particular series of commands that are not entirely documented or well understood in the technical community. The fact is that so many technologies change so fast that it is a monumental task to ask any team, yet alone a single person to understand all the best practices and/or component configuration requirements from floor to ceiling in a converged infrastructure solution, it is alot to know, no matter who makes the equipment.

In the first 6 months of VCE’s existence, over $100 Million of Vblocks shipped. Many of those first Vblocks were field assembled and we quickly decided that if we were to meet the demand that was ramping and we were to provide a platform that was constantly adopting new technologies from each parent company portfolio, we needed a means to deliver “platform consistency”. It is actually quite amazing that the industry didn’t arrive at that conclusion sooner.

Lets take for instance the industry of manufacturing cars. Some of us gear heads may take it upon ourselves to build a hotrod in our garage. The time we spend building that hotrod is time to relax and enjoy a hobby. I know of no business who uses a fleet of vehicles for business that goes out and buys all the parts to assemble those vehicles at any (insert auto part supplier name here). One might argue that professional racing builds there own cars but if you follow racing like I do then you will of course know that the big ones have engine shops that build all the engines and those who aren’t big buy the engines from other racing engine shops. Oh, one more thing those racing engines and the cars, cost about 50-100 times more than a car we might drive and they aren’t mass produced.

More realistically, businesses requiring vehicles for business operations will go to a dealership and order a type of vehicle that best serves the business requirements. If I were to start a business that required the use of vehicles, I would do some analysis on what sort of vehicle would meet the needs of the business.

Let’s say I happen to start a business of delivering food produce. That produce will be strawberries, broccoli, bananas, extra large green peppers and iceberg lettuce. I intend to expand to large fresh limes, small celery and bulk garlic. Now, I will require some refrigeration in the vehicle I plan to purchase but no requirements that you might see for frozen food delivery. I will also have several large grocery accounts versus many small markets and it appears to be more economical to have a large truck, supporting many large deliveries, versus a small truck doing short runs to neighborhood markets. I am in effect establishing a workload that will define the vehicle infrastructure that best serves my business needs.

Well if the dealership I went to said, we have this great document that tells you how to build your truck. We have lots of great people to help you build your truck, we just need to sit down and determine the truck that will fit your needs.

What type of frame would you like for this truck? We sell a c-shaped, boxed and hat frames but c-shaped frames are our most common, so we might suggest that frame. We will need to discuss the frame thickness, we typically sell frames in the 1/8″ to 3/16″ size. Once you choose your frame, we will need you to choose the suspension package and body design. When all of your options are chosen you can assemble it yourselves or hire someone to. Don’t worry about that right now, lets design your truck.

I don’t think I have to tell you but if I bought my own parts and built my own trucks, my produce business would have a fleet of trucks with varying hauling capacities, fuel mileage and reliability.

This is one of the reasons why VCE in October of 2010 transitioned all Vblock sales from a reference architecture assembled on a customer premise, to a Vblock Platform, manufactured in VCE facilities.

When you go to a dealership to buy a vehicle, you can buy it off the lot, if you have a standard configuration that fits your needs. If you happen to identify a particular vehicle you want but you would like a V12 engine with a carbon fiber body, you might have to custom order that from the factory. VCE will let you custom order Vblocks that we build at the factory. Imagine that, a platform that is “flexible” enough to be manufactured to a standard or to a custom build.

This gets to some of those very real investments that VCE has made in the business of building platforms to support the rapid pace to production with converged infrastructure platforms.

One of the investments VCE has made is in our staging facilities, which serve to be that collection point for taking components, checking for any component level failures and then performing firmware provisioning for those systems so that they are prepared for Vblock construction.

Once components have been firmware provisioned, they migrate from our staging facilities to Vblock build rooms where Vblocks are constructed to a template which provides a consistent physical build for all Vblocks. Physical builds are the fun and frustrating part of building your hotrod. Inevitably, when you are building your hotrod you find a particular part that doesn’t fit the way you expected and you need to get out a blow torch and some bondo to make that piece work. At VCE we build them every day, little tricks to get things done in the physical build are documented and repeated to drive efficiency in the build.

Physical Build Components

• Network Connectivity
• Fabric Connectivity
• Nexus 5000 and/or Nexus 7000 Base Network Configuration
• (Optional) Nexus 5000 SAN Fabric Base Configuration
• MDS 9000 (various model options) Fabric Base Configuration
• Storage Processor Base Configuration
• UCS Base Provisioning
• Rack & Cabling

After physical build, logical build begins and that process includes.

Logical Build Components

• Network Connectivity
• Fabric Connectivity
• Nexus 5000 and/or Nexus 7000 Production Network Provisioning
• (Optional) Nexus 5000 SAN Fabric Production Provisioning
• MDS 9000 (various model options) Fabric Production Provisioning
• Storage Processor Production Provisioning
• UCS Network Provisioning
• UCS Fabric Provisioning
• Hypervisor Installation
• Hypervisor Production Provisioning
• Hypervisor Management Base Configuration
• Hypervisor Management Production Provisioning
• Storage Provisioning and Server/Storage Mapping
• Boot From SAN
• FASTv2
• FAST Cache
• plus many more…..

Building Vblocks to a manufactured consistency gives us a predicability in build that is foundational to the Vblock brand. That consistency also affords VCE the ability to archive the performance characteristics of every build holistically and predict a workloads use of the underlying converged infrastructure resources such that VCE vArchitects, start the conversation with what do you want to do with the infrastructure, not lets build it and see how fast this hot rod will go. You need to ask yourself, do you want to build a hotrod for a local street race, or do you want to spend the same amount of money and get a team of F1 engineers who will ensure that your manufactured hotrod is designed for your track.

What is even more exciting is the timeline which we deliver a Vblock in a typical engagement. That is from the moment your partner receives the order and processes it with VCE to the time the system is powered on in your data center ready for a production workload is approximately 33 days (~30 days for delivery, ~1-3 days for onsite commissioning). That is the SLA for a 8 blade Vblock all the way to a (insert random hundreds number) blade Vblock – 33 days.

That drives me to the final series of points.

If…….. virtualization is about workload consolidation to drive efficiencies out of physical x86 servers and converged infrastructure is about consolidation of infrastructure components based on leveraging virtualization technologies in each layer of the infrastructure with its purpose to drive efficiencies out of the entire data center infrastructure……

then……. organizations will save money the quicker they get to production.

Reality is that customers can’t move fast enough, Vblock is about boxing up that complexity in a wrapper of simplicity and allowing your partners and your own internal IT staff to focus on the operationalizing of workloads to realize that infrastructure savings faster.

Don’t spend months building a hobby hotrod, let us help you achieve that rapid pace to production with formula 1 engineering at hotrod prices.

This is VCE and our new way to deliver IT and enable organizations to simply get there faster.

Game On,
Trey