Hello everyone and welcome back
to Journey to cloud blog, where we look at the various cloud options available
in the market from leading vendors and their advantages and dis-advantages. I
know that in my last blog, I did talk about exploring UCS in detail, but that
would be more product specific and it would be good, if we explore the options
that we have in the market first before getting down into the product details.
In today’s blog, we will try explore
EMC’s latest offering (VSPEX). Though the product has been out there in the
market for a few months now, it is still to gain momentum compared to the other
reference architecture products like FlexPod or Hitachi. So, with that lets try
to explore VSPEX.
VSPEX as the product is called (really
don’t know why – EMC has a passion for naming its products which ends with an
X, VMAX, VNX, Symmetrix) is EMC’s latest offering to cloud based on the
reference architecture model. Now as
discussed in my last blog, reference architecture is a set of best practices by
which different components that make up the cloud are connected together to get
predictable performance. Apart from
that, reference architectures deal more with the support offered in
administering the product and also on various levels of orchestration that can
be implemented on the product.
VPEX being a reference
architecture product is essentially made up of EMC storage. But unlike it big
brother the VBlock, it does not have Cisco and VMware tied to it as a bundle
nor it contains the monster called VMAX.
The VSPEX offering comes with VNX storage’s various flavors and along
with that, various flavors of network, servers and virtualization solutions can
be coupled.
The core component of VSPEX is VNX-
its EMC’s second flagship storage product after VMAX. VNX is basically a
combination of two of EMC’s previous storage offerings, the Clariion and the
Celerra. Clariion was SAN storage offering from EMC that served the mid size
customers effectively and Celerra was the NAS solution from EMC which used
either the Clariion or Symmetrix storage for backend and provided file level
access to the end users. But Clariion could never provide file level access by
itself and Celerra could never block level access. I think EMC wanted to
compete with Netapp at all levels since one Netapp box can provide both file
and block level access and they came up with VNX. Now, only the name is
different. VNX offers pretty much everything the Clariion and Celerra had to
offer in terms of replication, disaster recovery and high availability.
The other components that make up
the VSPEX are servers and networks along with Virtualization. Now, this is
where EMC has taken a giant step by allowing other vendors/competitors products
to integrate itself with VNX. For example, EMC and HP are direct competitors in
terms of storage, but the VSPEX model is fully compatible with HP servers.
Other than HP, EMC has extended its collaboration to DELL. Now, what about UCS,
the main component in Vblock. EMC is
still keeping the relationship intact with Cisco on the server front, so expect
to see UCS in some Vspex configurations.
Similar to servers, EMC has also
extended its network collaboration to Brocade and other vendors while still
continuing its association with Cisco with Nexus switches. But one of the
biggest strategic move is the decision to work with Citrix and Hype V along
with VMware. Citrix and Hyper V are direct competitors to VMware and VMware as
everyone would know it is actually a EMC company. But EMC have gone the smart
way for trying to keep their core business separate which is storage and
including the other two Virtualization companies was a good move. Now again,
this is to compete with Netapp’s Flexpod who have also moved from a VMware
centric solution to a Virtualization vendor free solution. This is move is both
good and challenging for EMC as with any reference architecture solutions, once
you sell the product, you have to support it and supporing HP or Dell along
with Citrix can be quite difficult. But from a customer point of view, I don’t
have to rely solely on VMware or UCS if my existing Data center is a HP
workshop with Hyper V.
Other than these core products,
there are quite a few additional products from EMC that add value to VSPEX like
Data Domain, which provides backup and recovery solution, RPA which provides
multi snapshot recovery. Overall, VSPEX
is a good solution from EMC to compete with Netapp on the Flexpod market, but
how good the solution is can only be determined in the days to come.
Take care,
For DCV
K
