News

VCE Adds Vblocks for Midsized, Remote Deployments

New Vblock versions sized for midsized and remote office deployments; specialized version for SAP HANA in-memory database also available.

• By Michael Domingo
• 02/25/2013

VCE, the cloud converged infrastructure company formed out of an EMC/Cisco partnership, late last week announced two new additions to its Vblock family that are resized for midsized and remote office deployments. Also announced were higher capacity versions of its core datacenter offerings, Vblock System 300 and Vblock System 700, as well as new software developed for centralized management across those systems, called VCE Vision Intelligent Operations.

New is Vblock System 200, targeted at midsized and distributed environment deployments, and meant to extend Vblock System 300 or System 700 boxes that are already deployed elsewhere in an organization. The system converges core IT services such as file and printing, domain configuration and management, VDI, and collaboration features, and can be scaled. The systems are built on top of Cisco UCS rack servers, using EMC VNX for storage. Management of the system is handled through new a new software solution, VCE Vision Intelligent Operations, which integrates directly into VMware's virtualization and cloud management solutions (as a side note, VMware has invested heavily in VCE, along with Intel Corp.), but can be managed via other third-party virtualization and cloud management suites.

Vblock 100, another newish offering, targeting remote or branch office deployments. "We've had the Vblock 100 on the market for about eight months, under a First Customer Ship program," said Erik Frieberg, VMware senior director for end user computing, but today's announcement is its public general availability debut. He said its debut was delayed as they developed and addressed the feature gap between the System 100 and the 300/700 series, a feature gap that is fulfilled via the System 200. Vblock 100 comes in 24RU (small enough that the company said it can be deployed inside of a computer closet) and 48RU configurations.

Updates to the System 300 and System 700 are mainly in the doubling of performance of the systems. "The way it's derived is, our ability to consume some additional technologies from the investor companies as it relates to quantities of the fabric extender, ports that we're optionally allowing customers to choose when they deploy the systems... Before, we had pretty thick I/O cofigurations. So we've not only increased the quantity of I/O connections between the blade servers, the fabric, the fabric and storage, the network, and the customer premise, we've also allowed those configurations to get smaller." Thus, the updates to each system, redubbed System 320 and System 720.

Another new offering are specialized Vblock versions, which Frieberg said are "Vblock systems designed around a particular application." In this case, he said the initial specialized Vblock will have SAP HANA loaded directly at SAP and offered through its channel. Support is meant to be seamless, with technical support done through a collaborative effort of the two companies. The system itself is SAP-certified. Frieberg said at least three new specialized Vblocks will be released this year. He said to expect new versions specialized for health care and government applicability, as well as a Cisco System collaboration.