Although I am not directly involved with the cost / expensing but I expect we will run this system for at least 4 years.  We are in year 2 and already looking at costs for renewal with the vendor or doing hardware maintenance 3rd party but that has yet to be determined.

You do not have to have all of these high experience teams of network, storage, and compute. All you need is one engineer to develop the LCS documents.

I don’t have a clear view on financial stuff but I can bring some clues. In traditional companies, you have a silo organization of each team. That means that the technical designers, engineering, and implementation teams in each domain that's SAN/LAN/SYSTEM/COMPUTE. So for each of them you have an expert on their domain. Meaning you have at least nine full time guy’s working on designing and building the solution, and in time there' an understanding of each others constraints.

Legacy built architecture disappeared with VCE converged infrastructure. Only one guy with transversal knowledge can achieve the LCS. That results in a strong and powerful infrastructure with nearly no downtime, and this is well known by the VCE technical support.

That doesn’t means that the technical guys are going to lose their job, they just need to acquire an in-depth knowledge of vBlock technologies because they have to run the platform, and adjust it regarding the company needs.

I don't have this information.

The cost of the system really comes down to the discount you are receiving from VMware, Cisco, and EMC. If you deal with these vendors on a regular basis you will better understand the cost of a complete solution.