Deploying an SD-WAN proof-of-concept is easy. But what happens when you want to take it to a hundred or more sites? Where are the case studies? Tom Hollingsworth looks at how Acadia Healthcare took SD-WAN to 60% of their sites and what lessons they learned from their experience.
Market positioning Acadia, EMC, Cisco and the whole vBlock Idea
Cisco, VMWare and EMC announced that they are forming a partnership to co-operatively sell and support products in a joint venture named Acadia. Selected engineers and sales grunts, USD$200 million bucks and “no large customer left untouched” door to door marketing campaign. Is there anything to it?
The Stack Wars Have Begun!
Just as public cloud computing is beginning to catch on, the enterprise data center world has been shaken up by the biggest IT product vendors. Rather than sit back and watch their wares commoditized, companies like Cisco, EMC, HP, and now HDS are stepping up to the plate with integrated “stacks” that include server, storage, networking, and management software. The next-layer players, VMware and Microsoft in particular, are joining hands, too, eager to support these stacks. To paraphrase the wise Jedi master, Yoda, “cloudy, the future is.” So, the stack wars have begun!
Too many or too few?
Chad Sakac recently tweeted about some issues EMC were having with VMware and there was a predictable and rather pathetic dig from NetApp about perhaps this being a result of EMC having too many product lines and having too much to QC.
An Exercise in Utility
EMC and VMWare’s coming together with Cisco is an exercise in Utility. If we take Nick Carr’s analogy of comparing utility computing with the power-generation industry, what the VCE alliance could be said to be is an attempt to define a de-facto standard for the ‘compute unit’. An attempt even to define what voltage the cloud should run at.
Enterprise Computing: VMware, Cisco and EMC Join Forces to Create Acadia
Finally all the speculation is put to rest as VMware, Cisco and EMC announce their joint venture: Acadia. The “coalition” of the three companies will work together to deliver private cloud infrastructure which utilises Cisco UCS, VMware vSphere and EMC storage hardware. All of this will be delivered in something called the Virtual Computing Environment […]