It’s clear that cloud computing has taken off. “The business case is now maturing, and the benefits are real,” says Phil Wallis, Managing Executive: VCE Solutions Group at StorTech. “The question that public and private sector organisations are asking is, How do I make cloud work in my environment?”

While there are some services that organisations are prepared to source from the public cloud, they often still prefer to retain control over their business-critical applications and infrastructure—while experiencing the benefit of the cloud model. The answer increasingly is a private cloud architecture, hosted at the client’s own data centre. “However, not all existing infrastructures are suited for cloud computing, which depends heavily on virtualization,” Wallis notes. “That’s where VCE and its Vblock solution come in as an acceleration along the virtualisation journey, and a much more efficient way to procure and consume IT.”

VCE is a company formed by Cisco and EMC with investment from VM Ware and Intel. It takes the best-of-breed approach, bringing together EMC’s storage technology, Cisco’s networking and compute architectures and VMWare’s virtualisation into a single, integrated and balanced offering that offers a single point of contact for support, and a single service-level agreement that can be scoped with the customer. “There is none of the finger-pointing that tends to mar a typical “component based” best-of-breed approach,” Wallis notes. “VCE’s Vblock creates a true converged infrastructure, pre-integrated and pre-engineered with virtualisation in mind. And because it’s balanced, the servers, storage and networking capacities are never out of sync with each other. We’re increasingly thinking of IT as a single, unified entity, and one could say that VCE provides just that, a converged infrastructure containing all the necessary elements designed and supported as a whole. At last, IT can be seen to be de-risking our customers business ”.

Although the VCE platform, VBlock is delivered to the client directly out-of-the-box, fully integrated and tested, each implementation of Vblock can be delivered with the specific customer environment in mind, and it is, uniquely, the only end to end solution on which a number of the major applications validated across the whole stack. “SAP was the first to validate that all its modules run perfectly on a Vblock. Microsoft also works very, very closely with VCE, and Exchange, SharePoint and SQL are already certified. Other applications are following suit, among them Oracle, EMC’s Green Plum and various virtual desktop solutions.”

Each of the three layers—storage, computing and virtualization—has its own intelligent provisioning, but the important point is that all three are centrally managed via Unified Infrastructure Manager, Vblock’s own piece of software that provides a single management portal for the entire stack.

 “It is also hugely attractive that Vblock can be delivered via a ’pay as you consume’  model, which means that upfront capital expenditure can be based on a small percentage of the forecast utilisation and not be tied to peak usage, while operational expenses can mop up the additional costs as and when consumption requires”

Based on client research conducted by SAP with the participation of EMC, Cisco and VMWare, Vblock saved up 19% in overall hardware and software costs, up to 30% in implementation costs, and 25% of ongoing maintenance costs. Upgrade costs, too, were reduced by up to 36% because the system is so easy to provision and has internal design integrity.

In South Africa and Africa, StorTech aims to become the dominant VCE partner. It has created a dedicated VCE business unit, and has a close relationship with Vodacom Business. The latter relationship allows the company to offer clients the ability to demonstrate the replication of workloads as large as complete Data centres across the network, particularly for disaster recovery. A close partnership with leading management consulting company Accenture is also expected to be a major differentiator.

“Virtualisation holds the key to simplifying the IT environment to reduce costs and maximize utilisation of infrastructure—while delivering better services to the organisation,” explains Wallis. “These benefits can be particularly relevant to large organisations with far-flung offices, such as one finds in the public sector, where both agility and consolidation is key. VCE’s solutions, notably Vblock, accelerate the journey towards virtualisation and its benefits. We’re working increasingly closely with government and its partners to help them understand the role that VCE can play in helping build out a cloud environment for the state.” 

Advertorial: Source GITOC 2011