Vblock tags in Vxblock: Move is a 'simplification' for punters

Dell EMC's converged infrastructure portfolio is changing. The Vblock – with its Cisco Nexus 1000v switch – is going away, while VxBlocks – with software-defined networking – are taking over. Cisco 1000v switches out, VMware switches in, Cisco-Dell relationship gets flakier; is that the story? The Vblock and VxBlocks are …

[John Smith 19]

Exciting news but missing reaction from one major player.

The Head of the NSA commented "This is great news. Anything that makes our job easier is good for us and good for America."

[Anonymous Coward]

what a misleading clickbait title...

[diodesign]

Re: anonymous

We got the wrong end of the stick - we've updated the article to make it much clearer. Apologies for any confusion.

C.

[Mac D]

Is this a joke?

Dell and EMC (see the Nicira acquisition) have been competing with Cisco for a long time now. Why do folks like Chad Sakac feel like it's okay to continue to lie to their customers?

Let's call a spade a spade...Cisco and Dell are going to compete more and more. It's good for the industry and good for customers. Might not be a great message for Chad and the Dell team, but the least they could do is to stop lying and treating us all as fools.

[Jbry]

Re: Is this a joke?

at the time of the Dell EMC merger announcement, EMC and Cisco announced an addition 5 year engineering partnership. Competitors? Yes. But when Dell EMC CI accounts for 30%+ of all UCS sales, and it is such a large growth engine for EMC, now Dell EMC...neither is going anywhere soon. Customers trump all else.

[gbarretoxx]

The DellEMC/Cisco partnership stays strong as stated by Chad : "VxBlock Systems have all the functionality of a Vblock System, including today using the same Unified Computing System (UCS) platform and the same Cisco Nexus network switches.

Interestingly, VxBlocks offer a superset of SDN choices over Vblock. VxBlocks support BOTH the SDN choices we see in our customer base – both the VMware NSX stack and Cisco ACI".

[Anonymous Coward]

There are viable alternative

Interestingly there is Linux based open source alternative to all this proprietary, vendor driven s**t and it is called OpenContrail. In version 4.0 Contrail supports OpenStack, Kubernetes and vSphere up to 6.0. And AFAIR someone from Mirantis did a demo of OpenContrail cloud spawning through AWS Kubernetes instance and on premises OpenStack. This is something real already deployed in world largest telco clouds. Bye bye Cisco and VMware.

[Fenton]

Re: There are viable alternative

But do you get the single point of call, a patch set (RCM) that has been tested against the entire stack including the hypervisor and provisioning software be that Enterprise hybrid cloud or pivotal cloud foundry?

That is the value proposition of the VxBlock.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There are viable alternative

How many boffins did those SPs have to employ to move to OpenStack? Not everyone has that luxury. Some enterprises just want to buy kit that actually works and has a fully supported lifecycle. One hand to shake, one throat to choke is a start, but many want someone else to take the heat for security and what-version(s)-of-what work with what-other-versions-of-stuff. Full disclosure - I'm a customer. I don't miss spending weekends reading release notes and wasting time.