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Delivering the First and Best Application-Centric Infrastructure on Vblock Systems

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Cisco’s Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) refocuses the data center on the driving force of businesses – applications. E-commerce, CRM, ERP and collaboration applications are just a few examples of applications that support mission-critical services to users throughout an organization. And increasingly, growing business demands are forcing IT professionals to manage even more applications with fewer resources, in less time.

Cisco’s innovative ACI is a new infrastructure architecture that unifies applications management with a centralized approach. ACI supports a programmatic, application centric policy framework, which simultaneously simplifies management of the entire datacenter while confirming that applications can receive the network infrastructure security and services they demand.  ACI represents transformational improvements in networking architecture and capabilities, and VCE is thrilled to bring these new technologies to our customers.

VCE was founded to deliver the “first and best” integration of technologies from our investor companies. We closely collaborate to align with the technology roadmaps for Cisco networking and compute, EMC storage and data protection, and VMware server virtualization and cloud management technologies.  We productize and deliver the industry’s leading converged infrastructure, the Vblock™ System. VCE employees are data center-focused professionals with a single purpose: To integrate and productize the innovations from our investors while enabling the best customer experience, something we call “The VCE Experience.”

Vblock Systems are standardized on Cisco data center products, such as the Unified Compute System (UCS) and the Nexus and MDS families of switches. With the new Cisco Nexus 9000 data center switching portfolio, we will be able to deliver the “first and best” ACI-enabled converged infrastructure system.

With the new integration, Vblock Systems will scale to meet peak network performance demands and allow unprecedented agility, reliability and simplicity for application deployment. VCE converged infrastructure solutions for the Cisco ACI policy framework will help to provide many benefits to customers, including:

  1. Visibility – Customers will have a detailed application-centric view of their infrastructure. Without impacting other applications, IT administrators will be able to scale application resources to meet user demands, quickly identify and address application performance issues, and maximize IT resources.
  2. Agility – IT organizations will be able to quickly deploy new technologies with significantly reduced risk to their IT infrastructure, allowing them to effectively manage, optimize and shift those resources.
  3. Open standards – The joint solution will simplify integration into existing and emerging management frameworks with an open, standards-based aggregation of Vblock Systems’ functional, environmental and operational characteristics.
  4. Simplicity – VCE roadmap integration with Cisco as well as our unmatched support, configuration and release management provide customers with streamlined operations management.
  5. Automation – VCE automation capabilities simplify and standardize error-prone processes associated with maintaining and deploying IT infrastructure and applications.
  6. Reliability – VCE provides customers with among the lowest risk and fastest path to implementing new Cisco technologies by integrating closely with the Cisco technology roadmap and providing defined engineering processes and procedures for manufacturing and sustaining Vblock Systems.

As Cisco expands its technology investments with ACI, VCE will introduce the new Nexus 9000 series switches as modular options within the Vblock Systems portfolio. Customers will be able to quickly realize all the benefits of the Nexus 9000 family and be prepared to take advantage of ACI’s powerful capabilities.

Cisco ACI triggers a new wave of data center engineering. By focusing on applications, IT professionals will be able to shift their focus from the challenges of managing autonomous components to the opportunities to better support and power business initiatives through an agile, systems-based networked infrastructure fabric.

About the Author: Trey Layton

Trey started his career in the US Military stationed at United States Central Command, MacDill AFB, FL. Trey served as an intelligence analyst focused on the Middle East and conducted support of missions in the first days of the war on terror. Following the military Trey joined Cisco where he served as an engineer for Data Center, IP Telephony and Security Technologies. Trey later joined the partner ecosystem where he modernized the practices of several national and regional partner organizations, helping them transform offerings to emerging technologies. Trey joined NetApp in 2004 where he contributed to the creation of best practices for Ethernet Storage and VMware integration. Trey contributed to the development of the architecture which became the basis for FlexPod. In 2010 Trey joined VCE, where he was promoted by Chairman & CEO, VCE, Michael Capellas to Chief Technology Officer, VCE. As CTO Trey was responsible for the product and technology strategy for Vblock, VxBlock, VxRack, Vscale and VxRail. During his tenure, VCE was recognized as one of the fastest technology companies to reach $1 Billion in revenues and one of the most successful joint ventures in IT history. The origional VCE products Trey has led strategy on continue to be leaders in their respective share categories around the world. In 2016 Trey was asked to lead from concept the development of an all Dell Technologies converged product. From that initial concept Trey led a global team of engineers to deliver Dell EMC PowerOne, the industry’s first autonomous infrastructure solution, embedding open source technologies which enable automated infrastructure integration based on declarative outcomes.