Acadia Solutions vArchitect
Intel is certainly an investor in the VCE coalition. Intel is an investor in many things. I don't believe most of these things get an extra "I" added just due to the fact Intel has an investment there.
It is crystal clear from the inside that the parent companies are committed to the project. It is patently absurd that a group of companies with a market cap in the hundreds of billions of dollars would be committed "as a pig is committed to bacon" on any single project. This is common practice known as diversification and means a little more than investing in both baseball cards and comic books.
Yes, Netapp works with VMware and Cisco. And we work with other partners as well. Businesses work together to improve products, satisfy customers, and increase revenue.
Yes, I doubt Intel will release a specific processor just for Vblock. Why would they? We use standard systems for all the components of the system.
As far as the "Greenplum Data Computing Apliance (sic)" goes, the basic scale of the offering is near the bottom of the Vblock Infrastructure Package offerings. I would imagine that if you need to go bigger than the standard package you will be able in the future to run Greenplum on a Vblock Infrastructure Package, although I have no inside knowledge of such plans. I would also imagine that if the Greenplum systems are qualified for Vblock then existing and potential Vblock customors will go directly to that stack.
You go on to say that only a fraction of the resources for R&D are invested in Vblock. Logically that follows my above observation that the parent companies have many products and so naturally the R&D will follow the strategic products from the parent companies. That being said, we use the terms "best-in-breed" or "best-in-class" perhaps too frequently to describe our product. It is accurate, however. So you bet Intel is focused with their dollars on the follow on to Nehalem, as is Cisco with improving UCS and Nexus, as is VMware with vSphere, as is EMC with Symmetrix, Clarion, and Celerra. These product improvements will show up quickly in the Vblock Infrastructure Packages.
It does not follow that IBM or HP will be more able to quickly respond because they're a single stack. Each of those products is composed of many components. Each of those components are created by different teams. The VCE coalition and Acadia are working together in the same manner to foster change and improvements in communication between these teams.
I do not understand the closing argument. The VCE coalition is committing resources, hiring rapidly, and making convincing sales in the market. Each of the parent companies has committed existing teams and resources to making this a success. How is this not a sign that they are working together more efficiently?
I expect a certain level of snark and sensationalism from the Register. I just don't expect that to be the entire substance of an article.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
