FWIW - a disclaimer: I wouldn't read too much into this blog post. I have perhaps some situational perspective - no more, no less.
Today was Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) launch - something many of us in the industry have been following and preparing for for some time.
To the whole of Cisco, and specifically the Insieme team (Soni, Prem, Mario, Luca and team) - congrats, I know how much blood, sweat, and tears go into birthing a new thing - and so there's always a degree of basic celebration that is well deserved :-)
While I'm looking forward to more, and also seeing the interaction on the inter web, here are my 2 cents on what to read into it:
- Cisco is driving towards an alternate "Software Defined Datacenter" approach - one that has elements of policy control and automation (UCS Director), and abstraction and pooling of physical assets (extending the UCS service profile idea to include more and more of the physical stack) with a focus on the network.
- People will get all wrapped up in the SDN part of this - but IMO, the growing importance of Cisco's growing management and orchestration IP is as important as the SDN/Nexus 9000 elements of the launch.
- There are two pretty wildly different approaches to SDDC - and while VMware and Cisco support each other, they do have a MATERIALLY different world-view:
- the VMware approach which is decidedly focused on "it is good thing to abstract and have no dependencies on any particular hardware approach". BTW doesn't mean that there can't be innovation in the hardware layers. VMware's approach has clear dependencies on the hardware stacks (compute/network/storage) - but their world view seems rooted in a philosophy: coupling policy/control/abstraction (software control plane) to hardware = bad. I want to be clear in my point here - it's not that Cisco doesn't "support" this view (they, like EMC ourselves, seem committed to remaining open) - but rather they have a different view, which is...
- the Cisco approach/philosophy/world view seems to be that "hardware can, and SHOULD be tightly coupled with software control planes (automation, abstraction, pooling) - in particular the compute and networking elements (and over time will expand to include their persistent data assets - Whiptail - and those of their partners). This is a large part of the thrust of the innovations in the Nexus 9000.
As is always the case - ultimately the customers will vote on these philosophies, and win.
To my Cisco brothers and sisters - **AND** those with alternate views on SDDC and SDN - my recommendation is use the "be a positive force" principle of the EMC Presales Manifesto. I've seen a little too much negative stuff in the past few months. The debate is real. I'm not claiming to live in a glass house (often we don't live up to the standard I would aim for), but when we do - it ends up being right (check this out - it put a HUGE smile on my face, and pride in the team - thank you whomever is referenced in this post!)
Switching gears a little - it's really a fascinating thing to look at the "EMC Federation model" through this launch. VMware has their perspective, EMC has ours. I fully expect people will be asking "what does the Cisco ACI launch mean in the landscape of all the industry alliances?"
Trust me (as a transparent guy on the inside) the EMC Information Infrastructure (that's the part of "EMC" that people associate with "EMC" as a brand) is 110% supportive of the Insieme/ACI model. We're also supportive of the VMware SDDC model. We're also supportive of the Openstack framework approach. We're also supportive of Microsoft's Windows and Azure efforts; the SAP and SAP HANA work; and even our coopetitors at Oracle (so, so good to see them shifting to a more reasonable support stance for vSphere)
This is analogous to Cisco and VMware partnering with others - all while having an integrated solution and JV around VCE and Vblock. Another example is the integration that exists between UCS director and VNX and VMAX. Another example is our recent work with Microsoft around Hyper-V, SCVMM - and the Windows Azure Pack (here)
This is what "open" means - choice, and that has been the basis of the entire "open systems" era.
I often get asked "when will EMC stop the 'open federation' model?". I'm not the CEO - but if I were, my answer is simple: "right now, customers are overwhelmingly favoring this model, and our shareholders are winning out of that (look at EMC and VMware over the last few years, and the potential in Pivotal). This federation model and choice is winning. If the customers and shareholders indicate to us that it's the time to change, then it's the time to change".
What's interesting to me is that I'm hearing from customers that while they still like choice - they are starting to value that less relative to other things (see the Vblock success in the marketplace, and Q3 had huge growth). It seems (?) that customers are internalizing that it's more important to make architectural choices and get on to the business of getting ITaaS done than continuing to hyper-optimize at the infrastructure stack.
What do YOU think?
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