Computacenter becomes first VBlock partner in UK
Cisco, VMware, EMC partnership for cloud gets British helping hand
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 14:57, 22 December 2009
Computacenter has become the first UK partner for the new Cisco, EMC, Vmware joint venture Acadia. The services company has been appointed a reseller for the new VBlock technology aimed at enabling enterprises build cloud computing infrastructures.
Vblock Infrastructure Packages combine virtualisation from VMware, networking from Cisco, and storage, security and management technologies from EMC. Vblock supports a broad range of operating systems and applications that enable customers to migrate existing applications to Vblock infrastructure to accelerate data centre virtualisation.
Terry Walby, director of of solutions and technology at Computacenter, said that what the product offered to the company's customers was the ability to buy cloud elements in an accessible package. "It's been pre-tested, pre-configured and pre-assembled so clients can buy something that they know they're going to work together." He said that customers would not be paying a premium for the convenience of having a single package. "Pricing for the product hasn't been finalised yet but it's going to at a cost competitive price point."
He said that there was a great interest shown by enterprises in these complete packages, pointing out that Arcadia was tapping into the trend set by IBM with its Dynamic Infrastructure while http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/matrix/how_to_buy.html range of products.
Walby said that VBlock was aimed specifically at new workloads rather than being used for existing workloads although he said that Computacenter would work on migrating existing applications to work with VBlock. "He also said that the company was looking at using VBlock with the aim at becoming a cloud provider itself. "We will work at helping customers migrate to a private cloud but will become a cloud provider too."
He expected customers to continue with their mixed environments. "Very few customers will be moving whole workloads to the cloud," he said. "For example, you might use Salesforce for your CRM but you wouldn't move email to the cloud."
