The Three P's of VCE

VCE provides Pre-integrated, Pre-tested and Pre-validated Vblock Systems.

What the heck is VCE and what exactly does this mean to be pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated? 

Lets start with a little background on VCE and who they are and more importantly why you should be paying attention to them. 

Formed by Cisco, EMC, and investments from VMware and Intel. VCE (VMware/Cisco/EMC) is the industry leader in hyper-converged infrastructure solutions or as it is known in the industry as "Converged Infrastructure" and according to the new Gartner study for 2014, VCE finds itself situated in the MAGIC quadrant. 

Estimations for this market, which includes single-vendor and multi-vendor converged infrastructures and hyper-converged infrastructures, will grow more than 50 percent in 2014 over 2013 to reach $6 billion.

Going back to the tittle of this blog and mentioned above, VCE is providing the Ps with the VCE. Lets take a look at each one of these.

Pre-integrated sure sounds interesting but what does that mean? VCE first performs an analysis of your current environment which includes collaborative planning and design verification to determine the design information that will be used to perform the pre-integration work. They will then perform all the pre-integration tasks, that are normally performed by your IT staff or possibly even you, to integrate the VCE into existing infrastructure like Active Directory, IPs, SAN Configuration, etc. 

If you have ever done the work to prepare a datacenter for a new infrastructure project like this, you know the tremendous amount of work that must be performed, from running the cabling to pre-configuration switch work for both network and SAN, insuring correct power, to interoperability matrix, etc. The service of pre-integration can be extremely accommodating when working with tight project driven deadlines and translates to a plug-in-play model that can be rolled into your current datacenter and plugged. 

Pre-tested also is something that sounds good but what exactly is tested?
Well, once the pre-integration is complete, VCE will test the stack, from the hardware layer through to the software layer. Testing to make sure that your SAN is able to handle to appropriate amount of IOPS you called for in your design, testing that the network is configured properly to insuring that the hundreds of components are functioning properly. That is a lot of testing that again can save countless hours in work usually designated to the IT Staff. 

Pre-Validated means that VCE will validate the design and validate that the company objectives are met.

• Conducting on-site or remote Proof Of Concept (POC) tests
• Validating customer configurations (e.g., for security and compliance mandates and reference architectures)
• Testing VCE Vision™ software integrations to meet and/or monitor security and compliance requirements in real time.
• HIPAA validation and testing.
• Partner Solutions testing, like VMWare Horizon View or VCAC.

This means that you can have confidence in the solution that VCE is providing to you.

The end result is that processes used to build a custom system on site are far more complex, far less reliable and far more expensive. 

In my opinion, VCE is Best of Breed with Single Point of Support. That means best of breed technology and one vendor to contact for support and that will save IT a lot of finger pointing and headaches.