VMware's high-wire balancing act: EVO might drag us ALL down

In the battle for the software-defined data centre, one of VMware's challenges is how to deliver software-defined/controlled storage without screwing up parent EMC's hardware-based storage revenues. VMware is an overall EMC Federation member along with Pivotal and the EMC Information Infrastructure (EMC II) unit. The three are …

[Joe 48]

VMware and Partners

Its not just internally that they might have issues, I wonder how partners will respond to this. Seems like VMware are now competing with them in quite a few markets. Cisco being a prime example of where VMware now have Networking and Compute tech sitting right in the same market. I wonder if Cisco will be shoehorning some storage into either the full UCS chassis or its new Mini using invicta

[Joe 48]

Re: VMware and Partners

Answers my own question!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/26/vmware_emc_frenemy_cisco_does_deal_with_simplivity/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: VMware and Partners

Dell, EMC and now Cisco have a product or partnership in play, HP have their existing StoreVirtual which has done this stuff forever and isn't tied to any specific hypervisor. IBM & HDS also have access to their own server range and so could easily partner for EVO or strike a deal with whoever else is out there in Hyper converged land.

Short of rebadging SuperMicro and lots of marketing WAFL, I wonder how Netapp can get into this market, maybe leverage some of the LSI bits and bobs they took with Engenio ?

[shrouded]

It seems likely that EVO:RAIL shouldn't cause much internal EMC strife.

During the keynote Pat G said that EVO:RAIL is here now, and that EVO:RACK is coming soon. Looking at Dell's YouTube tour of setting up EVO:RAIL it's obvious it's not build for the SME datacenter. It's wizard-based setup runs its own DNS & vCenter per appliance. Not many shops in the market for a VNX will want to run a bunch of standalone appliances without centralized DNS & vCenter.

It looks like EVO:RACK will be the offering for those customers. That's the really interesting proposition for the enterprise. What will it look like? I'm guessing it will look like :RAIL but able to scale and plug into existing DNS & vCenter, and able to use a plugin architecture to leverage enterprise storage via VVOLs.

[burjoes]

vCHS?

What do you mean about vCloud Air (formerly vCHS) being bundled with EVO Rail? I have not heard that. Log Insight is bundled, but I see no reference to vCloud Air or how it would fit in.

[Cloud, what..... Sorry... Um... - you just made that up.]

Whats the price

I imagine it will include the vcloud suite? At £10k per cpu so really anybody below a thousand users wont be intrested/ cant afford it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprised?

Tucci is head of VMware's board. If you think EMC had no say in this, you're either blind or stupid. If they wanted EVO dead, it would've been dead. EMC as a whole is re-tooling to be a software company, they know the days of hardware differentiation are done.

[Ideaz]

Vendor, disrupt thyself!

EMC knows SANs will be dying a painful death as enterprises slowly realize that generic servers with flash, direct-attached disk (for a while), clever software and generic networks can do much more for much less.

When EMC owns 80% of VMWare, when software margins exceed even EMC's gold-clad hardware, and when selling EMC-branded EVO to your SAN customers retains hardware revenue, why wouldn't EMC want to disrupt itself instead of snoozing while the startups do the job?

Especially when EMC is the only one of the six EVO partners that can get the software at a 100% discount.