The hallmark of VCE is our ability to take best-in-class production ready technologies and create a true converged infrastructure that enables unprecedented levels of IT efficiency and agility for mission critical environments – a.k.a, Vblock™ Systems. Our roadmap collaboration with Cisco, EMC and VMware ensures that VCE is “first and best” in the integration of their new technology, offering our customers the most rapid, risk-free path to take advantage of technology innovation.
Speaking of innovation and new technology, you can’t go very far today without hearing about software defined networking (SDN). There are many interesting and promising strategies with SDN in the marketplace but our research and customer validation indicates that a successful SDN product architecture links physical and virtual networks together with an application centric focus. Our customers have told us that any detachment from infrastructure creates problems with operational network visibility and complicates analysis and performance optimization. Because of this, we see that for any emerging SDN technology to succeed it cannot mask a physical network device’s importance by exclusively delivering software features that have limited device awareness. The answer to operational network challenges is in software and hardware innovation that enables programmatic policy on application-focused endpoint communications, integrating security and load-balancing characteristics with deep operational telemetry.
In June of this year, at Cisco Live in Orlando Florida, Insieme Networks was unveiled and the world was given introduction to Application Centric Infrastructure. Cisco has approached every technology transition with innovations based on architecture first, allowing solutions to adapt to wide ranging customer use cases. The Application Centric Infrastructure strategy follows this approach, and it’s advent has enabled VCE to speak publicly about the hard work we are doing to bring Application Centric Infrastructure to our customers as a new pillar of future Vblock Systems networking fabrics.
VCE, as a joint venture of Cisco, EMC and VMware was built on the premise that customers were looking for an architecture-based answer for mission critical data center computing, optimized for both virtual and physical workloads. VCE was established to deliver to our customers best in class technologies from each of our investors, utilizing Cisco Servers & Networking, EMC Storage & Data Protection and VMware Server Virtualization & Virtualization Management technologies. Through their investments in, and support of VCE — Cisco, EMC and VMware have realized leadership positions in the converged infrastructure market.
Vblock Systems have always used the Cisco Unified Compute System (UCS) as a transformational platform. Cisco’s UCS has enabled new efficiencies to be gained by abstracting the physical attributes of a server and introducing the ability for servers to be managed within a policy framework through service definition and centralized management.
Much like UCS did with compute, Insieme Networks will bring transformational technology concepts to network architectures — enabling a programmatic, network-centric policy framework, centrally managed as a system, delivering abstracted identity of network connectivity, security and network based services. Because it will become a key technology capability of future Vblock Systems, this architecture will interconnect business logic in applications running on the underlying physical infrastructure that Vblock Systems are built upon.
Application Centric Infrastructure as part of future Vblock Systems will extend the capabilities of these systems by delivering a programmatic, OPEN standard, production ready, scalable and secure converged infrastructure networking fabric. Building integrated solutions with the most comprehensive technology architectures are what our customers demand from VCE and we are proud to deliver.
Application Centric Vblock Systems will be introduced in a phasing of technology release, enabling current VCE customers to deploy these advanced capabilities while protecting their existing investments as new innovations are introduced.
Stay tuned for more announcements from VCE and Cisco as the world’s most converged infrastructure goes beyond SDN.
