Here’s the bottom line.
You can buy a Vblock, which is a Cisco/EMC product integrated at time of manufacture running vSphere on Intel processors with proven solutions and reference designs for backup, recovery, replication, federation and so on.
Or.
You can continue to buy from any of the three suppliers the way you always have.
Away from the knee-jerk reactions and FUD spraying by those who have nothing new to talk about this week, from that webcast I don’t see any dramatic market polarisation going on here.
Cisco and EMC have an integrated offering from the hardware to the management and the system security which they can position against HP/IBM while VMware and Intel ensure their competitors don’t get an equal footing on that particular path to market.
Looks like they all get what they wanted today. It’s less about polarisation and more about pragmatism.
