One of my responsibilities at VCE is leading our worldwide pre-sales engineering team for Public Sector. Public Sector, in the context of a single geography like the United States or United Kingdom, is a significant span of opportunity. VCE Public Sector is defined as Education, Local, State, Provincial and Federal Governments. Organizations in this sector are consuming Vblocks at an incredible pace and my worldwide team needs vArchitects to support the very exciting opportunities in this sector.

If you have prior military, intelligence agency, civilian agency, state or education experience around the world and want to join our team, please send me your resume (trey.layton@vce.com).

We are doing some incredibly exciting things in the science and defense industries with Vblocks. Just think, you may be the vArchitect to put the first Vblock in space or help design a tactically deployed Vblock, supporting some defense force around the world. If you have had or presently have a US TS SCI or other international government security clearance, this would be a plus.

Presently looking for candidates in the following locations:

• US – District of Columbia Area (several positions)
• US All Regions
• Latin America
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Nordic Region
• Middle East
• Asia Pacific Region – Australia, New Zealand, Japan and China

Gameon,
Trey

On November 4th, 2009 The Virtual Computing Environment was born. On that day, three announcements were made.

• Vblock – The reference architecture, an amazing effort to bring together a cross functional team from VMware, Cisco & EMC, to produce a documented architecture as a foundation for cloud, that all companies would market and sell together
• The VCE Coalition – A partnership formed to evangelize and bring a market force to selling the Vblock architecture
• Acadia Enterprises – A Joint Venture formed by Cisco, EMC and VMware targeted for 250 Million in revenues and about 200 employees – focusing on creating a services center of excellence for Vblocks

The market feedback for this partnership was compelling, the coalition quickly brought on its first few customers and tens of thousands of Cisco, VMware & EMC field sales teams were evangelizing Vblock for data centers.

Cisco, EMC & VMware quickly began to expand teams within their own companies, dedicated to the effort of architecting and selling Vblocks. At EMC, Chad Sakac quickly took several vSpecialists and dedicated them to the VCE effort. He additionally embarked on a journey of ensuring that his worldwide vSpecialist team was capable of evangelizing the Vblock architecture from compute through network to storage. Cisco & VMware dedicated their own organizations to the coalition. VMware called this team simply VCE and Cisco created a team called SST. The SST organization was the team I joined when I came to the coalition in May 2010.

Coming back to Cisco was an emotional experience because I personally had worked at Cisco for many years and I was at a competitor to EMC who was looking at Vblock as a competitive threat.

Upon joining the coalition the first thing I noticed was that the coalition collaboration was strong but our strategy for going to market was colored by the organization you were in. That of course was the parent company which employed you.

If you received a VCE – Vblock presentation, as a customer or partner in that time you likely have seen a technology conversation heavily slanted to the company who employed the person presenting. This sort of see an EMC guy present Vblock and hear about storage, see a Cisco guy present and hear about UCS and see a VMware guy present and here about ESX & future vCloud Director was not delivering the right messaging to our customers.

In addition, Acadia Enterprises was looking like a services competitor to many of our partners. That was in actuality never the intent. Acadia was focused on a services area of the market, serving as a Center of Excellence for leading innovation and best practices for partner services around Vblock.

This was inter-mixed against the shear demand for Vblocks, which far exceeded the best expectations of leadership. The first Vblocks actually shipped in January of 2010, only a few weeks after announcement. What is amazing is that the first Vblocks to ship were significant in size and stretched across multiple decision makers and budgeting efforts, within a customers business.

Demand for Vblocks simply far exceeded planning and expectations of the original Vblock/VCE Project called Project Alpine.

So – customer demand, organizational structure and competitive threats to target the mission of Acadia placed the organization at a cross roads only 3 months into its existence. A new plan needed to be implemented.

The plan, use the Acadia Enterprises Joint Venture as a vehicle to move dedicated VCE resources from each parent company to Acadia. Change the Acadia Enterprises go to market plan, preparing to hire one thousand employees and quickly grow to a 1 billion dollar company focused on Vblock as a product exclusively. Also, use VCE as its originally intended Center Of Excellence for Professional Services, led by a worldwide partner community.

This plan was initiated by the hiring of Michael Capellas as CEO in May of 2010. Michael was the former CEO of HP/Compaq and MCI/Worldcom as well as a 7 year veteran of Cisco’s Board of Directors where he was chair of Cisco’s acquisition committee.

Michael joined Acadia as CEO and quickly began to assemble a leadership team across the organizations which would ultimately form the new VCE company.

• Sales
• Product Engineering
• Solutions Engineering
• Seamless Support & Service
• HR
• Finance

All the while, demand I spoke of on Vblock launch was increasing. In the summer of 2010 two significant milestones were passed by VCE and Vblock. The first was that the 50th Vblock was sold, soon after that Vblocks crossed the $100 Million in shipments.

In the summer of 2010 demand for Vblocks once again outpaced expectations but this second thrust of demand was on a foundation of customers who provided invaluable feedback in the shaping of VCE’s next product evolution, “Vblock as a Product” < more on that here.

VCE, to meet this demand, needed to structure the company in a manor that could address the opportunity in partnership with our parent companies. Details of that plan included the sales team being segmented for Enterprise, Channels, Service Provider, Public Sector and Systems Integrators. Engineering would be segmented into three organizations

• Product/Platform Engineering
• Solutions Engineering
• Seamless Support & Services

The leadership team, across all functions, would begin the process of building their teams and synchronizing the very best of the best that each company had to offer for this opportunity.

Moving hundreds of employees from each parent company into the Acadia Enterprises Joint Venture proved to be a monumental task, but one that the leadership team and the employees navigated with exceptional focus. The product engineering, solutions engineering and support teams were working to create the 1st Vblock sold as a “product” that is a fully manufactured platform and hypervisor functional at delivery.

Selling a new way to consume IT to customers was a large enough challenge but we simultaneously needed to change the way each parent company sales team positioned Vblocks. No longer would Vblocks be field assembled components, based on a reference architecture, they had evolved to a turn-key platform, with incredible stability and scalability. The weeks and months that followed this effort our channels team focused on rapidly accelerating the number of VCE partners around the world. VCE had quickly established 120+ partners in 29 countries and Vblock, VCE & Acadia had yet to be a year old.

In December 2010, at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, NV – VCE/Acadia announced that the name Acadia was gone and VCE – The Virtual Computing Environment Company was born. This company was far more than a marketing announcement but really an announcement that we had been busy for the last 12 months, building a company in size and scope that far exceeded original plans. During that time VCE passed $100 Million in shipments and attained over $1.2 Billion in product pipeline.

It’s worth stating again. $1.2 Billion in pipeline at the first anniversary of the products existence. Look up your favorite tech giant and see how long that company took to achieve $100 Million in sales. VCE did it in nearly 6 months of existence.

Tomorrow, a new world opens as VCE embarks on the journey of the second year. In this second year, expectations are far greater, the foundation is built, the teams have formed and the Game is On.

Game On,
Trey

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

This article kicks of the launch of a new site, virtual-architect.com, as my old site ethernetstorageguy.com was created when I was working at NetApp and I focused on ethernet connectivity topics for storage connectivity. That work and the introduction of converged infrastructure solutions to the industry gravitated me to a place where I could maximize my prior engineering experiences.

In my travels, meeting with partners and customers throughout the world I am often asked to describe why VCE is different and what brought me to the organization. The answer is multi-part but most directly because I had a belief that converged infrastructure solutions were the data center solution of the future. It was how I believed infrastructure would be bought in the future. The only way to truly realize the benefits of this convergence of data center technologies was actually to work for an organization that could participate actively in the engineering effort associated with the components of the converged infrastructure. Participating was beyond individual component awareness. I mean active engagement in the roadmap of each component through the lens of a unified infrastructure that was more than just storage, compute and virtualization but all – at the same time.

At VCE we have built an organization of people who have experiences in each of the core components, many (like myself) who came from parent company organizations but hold a common awareness, that the sum of the components, developed as an integrated entity, is table stakes for the vision we see for the future.

Integration is a term that describes where we started in November 2009, when the VCE Coalition and Vblock was announced. The future of that integration is exciting and is a direct result of the organization we have been forming since that initial announcement.

Today VCE is an organization comprised a strong engineering talent but what is likely most visible is a worldwide sales engineering team focused on enabling VCE partners and parent companies in the sales of Vblock infrastructure solutions. The less visible engineering organization is what is actually the greatest mass and source of innovation. This only begins to explain the substance of VCE.

The first of these less visible engineering organizations at VCE is Platform/Product Engineering.

Platform Engineering’s responsibility is to own the roadmap and development of everything “in a Vblock” Now many in the industry know the component technologies “in a Vblock”.

Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, EMC Unified Storage, VMware Virtualization Products and Technologies

You also know that each of the VCE parent companies have engineering organizations responsible for the development of each component technology and they will continue to. The parent companies engineering focus is to bring products to market with industry leading features and broad market penetration. The goals of these organizations are specific to the parent and rightly so, they focus on market share for the parent company.

VCE Platform Engineering delivers engineering focus which is in addition to the parent engineering organizations. The goals of this organization are to combine parent company products and introduce features which create the worlds most capable converged infrastructure platform. This team is comprised of executive leadership, project management and individual engineers versed in each products capability. The organizations executive leadership focuses teams, to align them with the goals of the collective parent company product initiatives, enabling a strategic focus on Vblock innovation, to compliment the parent companies product & market segment solution goals. The engineers in platform engineering are in effect embedded in parent company product business units and are focused on Vblock as VCE employees. This is essential in the development of a world class converged infrastructure platform as these teams are not distracted by general product compatibility requirements, they are dedicated to Vblock development. Said differently, they are exclusively focused on Cisco, EMC and VMware technologies functioning together as a system.

The Solutions Engineering organization is built in similar structure but deals in the business of everything which operates “on a Vblock”. This team of individuals brings decades of experience with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and other technologies which operate on Vblocks. These engineers build application reference architectures for the Vblock platforms. They focus exclusively on innovations which provide the broadest value to Vblock customers, running the IT worlds most business critical applications.

Platform Engineering and Solutions Engineering are just some of the substantive focus VCE has built to bring to market the most innovative converged infrastructure solution in the industry. What is the most exciting is knowing what is planned to be released in complement to what Vblock has already delivered to the market.

Stay tuned VCE Partners & Customers the future is bright and 2011 is going to push the industry to change again.

Game On,
Trey

My boss and I held our organizations leadership meeting in Austin Texas a few weeks ago. We wanted to ensure our leadership team was focused on ending the year strong and starting the year with significant momentum. We asked Michael Capellas to visit with us and address the team to close the meeting on the second day, then join us for a great dinner. Michael, as he always does, asked us what we wanted to cover and we asked for two things.

• Talk about how he sees the market for cloud based computing evolving
• Talk to the team about leadership

Michael did not disappoint, he positioned himself in front of the room in a chair facing everyone, conversing with everyone in his jovial manner as he prepared to begin. Michael then started his closing content for the meeting and it is most simply said that he has a unique way of working a room. Michael will ask everyone in the room what they want answered, he will demand you be direct and that you have an opinion. Once everyone has had a chance to ask questions or make comments, he begins the process of answering everyones questions in a inspirational conversation which covers past, present and future perspectives, making sure he covers every persons question with direct and honest answers. This format forces you to consume your answers in a broader context which is instructive to anyone who leads a team of any size.

Working in the military prior to my business career starting, I witnessed a similar delivery by General Schwartzkopf and General Powell. They each, during intelligence briefings, would amaze you by their ability to store information prior to them initiating questioning on a subject. To understand this you need to understand how intelligence briefings would work. Typically a Lieutenant or Captain would be given briefing packages from each analyst responsible for topics which were being covered in that briefing. The briefer would stand at a podium in the front left of the room with a large screen to their right capable of showing digital content (pictures, videos, slides).

Each analyst having content presented would sit in the back of the room, or at its sides, in chairs away from a large conference table in the room. Surrounding this table would be each of the Generals staff and civilian advisors. The individuals at the table where very typically those they hand picked to help them navigate the business of defending the United States interests in their area of responsibility. The General would sit at the head of the table with nothing more than a pen and a small notebook (which I never saw used). After each briefing package was verbally presented, the Generals would then turn to the analyst responsible for creating the content and recite statements made in the briefing package for clarity or to further question.

Generals understand the dance between thinking and acting, both strategically and tactically. They waited to receive all briefing content to assess all aspects of the information delivered. So that they could appropriately address the inter-relationship between the information in the context of local, regional and global interests.

Michael’s engagement with my team was precisely what was needed as each individual had a different perspective on our opportunity in the market. Every individuals questions were a calibration point for Michael to package the data points that were most important to my teams perspective. The then effectiveness of his subsequent delivery is immeasurable. When you are led you want to have high confidence that your leader understands a broad base of perspectives including those you have not yet considered.

I and my team are inspired each day by the leadership we have at VCE, to include our leaders at our parent companies. I hope that I may one day inspire the teams who work with me, in the manner that I have seen leaders inspire me and them. At VCE we feel very lucky to be in an organization that is directly tied to an incredible coalition of companies (VMware, Cisco, EMC & Intel).

Trey….