Reviews for the Cloud Solution by VMWare, Cisco, NetApp (2 posts)

I am looking for reviews/ feedback for the Cloud solution proposed by VMWare, Cisco, NetApp jointly. Has anyone evaluated or implemented this first hand? If yes, I would be glad to hear about the plus (and the minus) points around this. (I am not looking at vendor opinions or marketing material, rather inputs from their customers/ partners/ service providers)

Hi I have personally been involved with the Vblock and UCS environment several months.

I sold one of the very first Vblocks to a Service Provider and have found the solution to be very well designed and integrated together. The UCS Manager tool set greatly adds to the ease of setting up Virtual Machines. The Palo I/O cards provides for upwards of 128 virtual connections, that can either be net or San, with the capability of easily allowing Vmotions to happen with out loosing I/O connections in the process. The ability to support 384GB of Ram on a dual socket blade is a great asset got building out a lot of VM's, as well as Data Base environments that can use lots of memory to provide extremely fast performance. It decreases the cost of VMware licenses as well. What I would say is that a complete closed loop automation toolset is still not available from any single vendor today. Its easy to design a automated provisioning environment, but delivering a fully automated SLA management capability including the application level, with the ability to kick off automatically remediation actions is work that is still in process.