VCE Enhanced

VCE Company, LLC unveiled a series of new products, services, and partner enablement programs that will extend the transformational value that VCE brings to customers and partners, enabling them to realize the speed, reliability, and efficiency benefits that a converged infrastructure can deliver.

VCE is unveiling new Vblock Systems, new Vblock Specialized Systems, enhanced VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software, new VCE Cloud Accelerator Services, and an enhanced VCE Partner Program.

These announcements are underscored by the release of a new IDC white paper that quantifies the customer benefits of VCE’s approach to true converged infrastructure systems.

"VCE has set the pace in true converged infrastructure, delivering innovative products and services to customers that enable transformative results by reducing costs, increasing reliability, and accelerating time-to-market," said Praveen Akkiraju, CEO, VCE. "The solutions announced, along with our increased investment in our partners, reinforces our commitment to help customers simplify and accelerate the deployment of next generation datacenter and cloud infrastructures. With VCE, IT organizations are able to more effectively support and – for the first time – get ahead of end-user requirements in today’s dynamic business environment."

New Product and Service Offerings:

Vblock System 340

It incorporates the latest compute, network, storage, data protection and virtualization technologies from VCE investor companies, demonstrating that Vblock Systems offer a fast way to deploy new technologies from Cisco, EMC, and VMware into production with minimal risk. This new system offers up to four times the performance and twice the capacity of the previous Vblock System 300, delivering customer value.

Vblock Specialized System
for High Performance Databases
Architected for the largest, demanding database deployments (such as Oracle), the Vblock Specialized System for High Performance Databases can handle environments requiring millions of IO/s, scalability to hundreds of terabytes, and availability – all while lowering costs associated with operations and licensing. Unlike dedicated database appliances, this system offers the flexibility to support mixed workloads and multiple database versions.

Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications
Created to meet the requirements of the most latency-sensitive environments, such as VDIs, it features all-flash technology with inline data reduction. This specialized system offers the performance and responsiveness needed for massively scalable VDI implementations at a competitive price-per-desktop.

VCE Vision Intelligent Operations 2.5
Introduced in February 2013, this software intelligently and dynamically informs management frameworks about Vblock System configuration and health – enabling the Vblock System to be seen and managed as a single converged infrastructure object. This new version enhances these capabilities by offering automated updates of new patches and software releases for Vblock components, proactive scanning and reporting on release and security compliance. VCE Vision also supports the native discovery of Vblock Systems within the VMware vCenter Operations Suite, proactively ensuring health and operational efficiency of Vblock Systems, and VCE offers vCenter Operations Manager as part of an integrated Vblock solution. In August, VCE also announced integration with VMware’s new vCenter Log Insight offering.

VCE Cloud Accelerator Services
It help customers rapidly and efficiently plan, build, and implement scalable ‘as a service’ cloud infrastructure environments. These services combine business process, operations, and organizational transformation expertise with pre-integrated capabilities for self-service, service management and chargeback that have been designed, tested and optimized for Vblock Systems. This enables customers to deploy new cloud based offerings quickly and with lower risk.

Enhanced VCE Partner Program
It increases opportunities and enablement for partners to develop and expand their businesses around VCE’s converged infrastructure solutions.

Targeted to partners that sell and deploy
Vblock Systems, the program includes:

• Greater incentives and benefits to encourage partner investment with VCE
• New partner tiers to reward existing partners and streamline the onboarding process for new partners
• New specializations for specific solutions

New IDC White Paper:
Convergence with Vblock Systems: a Value Measurement
This VCE-commissioned white paper quantifies the benefits realized by enterprises and service providers that have deployed VCE Vblock Systems – indicating that Vblock System implementations sped application deployments, simplified operations, improved business-support agility, saved money, and freed staff to focus on delivering new business capabilities, improving user satisfaction.

The white paper indicates that, on average, customers realized the following benefits from VCE Vblock Systems:

• Four times faster deployment for new infrastructure, with 79% less staff effort
• Five times faster deployment for new services
• 96% reduction in downtime
• Reduction of annual data center costs by 50%

Vblock System 340 is available. Vblock Specialized System for High Performance Databases and Vblock Specialized System for Extreme Applications are targeted for availability in Q4, 2013. VCE Vision Intelligent Operations 2.5 is targeted for availability in Q4, 2013. VCE Cloud Accelerator Services are available.

"At Apollo Group and University of Phoenix, we have hundreds of thousands of adult learners that count on being able to attend class, work on assignments and participate in team discussions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our students intermingle learning with life each and every day to achieve career outcomes they care passionately about," said Michael Sajor, CIO, Apollo Group, Inc. "VCE’s principles around delivering a true converged infrastructure have made the company extremely successful at delivering new Vblocks that can manage these high-performance, low-latency environments crucial for enabling our online classroom and learning environments. By engineering, manufacturing, managing, supporting and sustaining Vblocks as a single, true converged infrastructure, my technology professionals can focus on deploying advanced capabilities that power our student’s success and aspirations – and not waste time on just keeping the lights on."

"VCE’s cloud Accelerator Services will simplify our deployment, minimize our time to market, and lower business deployment risks by providing a pre-engineered, pre-validated, and pre-tested solution for enabling secure, high-performance cloud infrastructures to customers," said Paul Birkin, CTO, Capita IT Services.

"As the premier leader in converged infrastructures, VCE understands the need to innovate and expand its offerings to help us meet the ever increasing demands of IT infrastructure users," said John Meng, senior director, enterprise systems and infrastructure, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants Group LLC. "VCE is a lifeline – their ongoing innovation with new products and services continues to impress Kimpton and ensures their commitment to meet the reliability, security, and high-performance needs of the hotel industry."

"In order to provide the highest quality customer experience, the financial services industry demands top-notch performance and constant availability from its datacenter infrastructure," said Lisa Huston, senior manager, platforms, Raymond James & Associates, Inc. "Due to VCE’s dedication to engineering, manufacturing, managing, supporting, and sustaining their products as one system we have the confidence to provide our mission-critical services based on VCE’s best-of-breed infrastructure."

"IDC’s in-depth conversations with organizations deploying converged systems consistently found dramatic improvements in time to deployment, availability, operational simplicity, and cost compared to traditional IT environments," said Richard Villars, VP, datacenter and cloud, IDC. "Business and IT benefits like these are driving the rapid adoption of converged infrastructure, and with enhancements like those announced by VCE, IDC expects organizations to more quickly upgrade mission critical, tier one applications on these systems."

"As one of the earliest proponents of VCE, we’re extremely pleased with their rapid incorporation of new offerings from EMC, Cisco, and VMware," said Bob Olwig, VP, business development, World Wide Technology, Inc. "With VCE’s new specialized systems, Vblock 340, and Vision 2.5, we can provide our customers with the most agile, resilient and secure offerings available – enhancing our ability to meet customer performance and scalability demands."

"As one of VCE’s key investors, Cisco’s networking and compute technologies are tightly integrated with their Vblocks, making today’s announcements an important testament to our success and collaboration," said David Yen, SVP and GM of the data center technology group, Cisco Systems, Inc. "As we look at the need to bring applications and network infrastructures closer, having integrated Vblock solutions from VCE represent the future of making infrastructure more application friendly, and data centers more efficient."

"VCE continues to change the course of computing by dramatically reducing the cost of IT while improving time to deployment for customers," said Christine Fraser, SVP, EMC technology alliances. "Leveraging EMC’s recently announced storage systems into VCE’s new offerings is the latest example of how the EMC and VCE alliance continues to thrive. By utilizing EMC’s highest-performing and most-advanced Flash and other leading EMC storage technologies within the new Vblocks, VCE remains on the leading edge and has once again proved its mastery of integrating best-of-breed technologies in a simple and comprehensive offering."

"Our long history of joint development with VCE has provided valuable results through the integration of VMware cloud Management products with VCE Vision software and Vblock Systems. Together, we’ve created a seamless, rapid journey to the cloud, as well as greater ease of use, streamlined support, and business agility for IT organizations," said Ramin Sayar, SVP and GM, cloud management business unit, VMware, Inc. "As we deepen our relationship and portfolio enhancements with VCE, we’ll continue to deliver dynamic management and automation solutions, while providing substantial value to customers."