Journey to the Private Cloud: Which Route Will You Take?

As IT pros and data center owners, we’ve been successfully building our own private clouds for some time. However, the question remains… who should be building our private clouds? Should we retain the roles of architect, tester, quality control, integrator, and support? Should we look to our vendors to provide us with private cloud “blue prints”, or should we simply buy the private cloud?

When it comes to our private cloud, we tend to lean toward building it ourselves. Yet we are faced with the build vs. buy decision all the time, with often a very different outcome. Take for instance the last time you needed a new car. Did you…

  • buy all the parts and tools you thought needed and started building your new car? No blue print, no guarantee it’ll work and no guarantee it won’t cost you more than your anticipated budget.
  • acquire a blueprint for the car you wanted, purchase all the parts and tools prescribed, and follow the blueprint until your car was ready for the road?
  • go to the car dealer and buy the car you wanted?

Now if you’re into building your own automobiles – or private clouds – have at it. Just beware that the more variables (component makes and models, quantities, sizes, connectivity, scalability, supportability, etc.) introduced into the design, the greater the risk to the success of the architecture – both short and long term. Granted, we’ve actually gotten pretty good at building our own private clouds and for the seasoned data center architect, it’s probably not as hard as building a sedan from scratch. However, the time spent selecting components, procuring hardware and software, integrating technologies, validating and rolling out the infrastructure, could be spent addressing projects aimed at tackling the rapid changes in today’s organizations. If we can simplify procurement, integration, care and feeding, and vendor support of our private clouds, we can get back to what’s most important… supporting the business!

VCE Company’s Vblock™ System

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a strong emergence of reference architectures, and although it has clear advantages over the build it yourself model, more and more of our customers are looking to take advantage of a completely converged infrastructure. These customers are looking for simplified procurement, integrated management across the stack, and a single line of support. This is what VCE Company introduced to the market with their Vblock™ System and the competitive advantage many CxOs are looking for.

Based on industry leading technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC, the Vblock™ System is a prepackaged, integrated platform with known, tested, and validated operational parameters, built for fast deployment with absolute minimal risk.  Translation… It’s designed to work!

  • Thousands of hours dedicated to designing and testing the physical build specifications: power, thermal, rack layout, cabling, cooling, expandability
  • Thousands of hours dedicated to certify software releases and test logical build configurations
  • An engineering organization dedicated to sustaining a product roadmap of the entire infrastructure (VMWare, Cisco, EMC)
  • A world-class factory to physically build each Vblock™ System the same way
  • A dedicated engineering organization in place to take the first call of support for any problems, regardless of vendor
  • An expert team (optionally, or in conjunction with a certified partner – like Arraya) onsite to physically deploy with the customer’s configuration details within 45 days from order

For more information on the Vblock™ System, contact your Arraya sales representative or click here

Arraya Insights