This solution has rock-solid reliability. When a problem does occur, you can call the service number or support site to initiate a service request.

We are approaching 3 years of operation with little problems with hardware.  Had one 5K switch fail some ports and replaced that under service.  The VCE Matrix of knowing what software, drivers, firmware and ESXi bundles all work together is a big relief in not having to dig through each and every part of the hardware and software updates to be sure they are all compatible.

The most valuable features are reliability and high availability.

It's an integrated box Mac solution, so it's a plug and play. The deployment and build is pre-made and ready to deploy. It makes it easy to apply. 

The integration between components, so that we don't have to worry about technology mismatches.   Not having to worry about the firmware integrations with the software infrastructure components has been grand.

The most valuable feature is that it is centrally managed, as it is quite easy for our customers to manage everything, end-to-end.

• Dealing with multiple vendors can be tricky in multi-vendor setup. Having one vendor to deal with from a support perspective is a huge potential benefit when it comes to reliability and avoiding wasting time and money. 
• Finding a fully bundled, deployed, and configured solution with a short delivery time and unique support is really attractive.
  
• As far as customer satisfaction, it will meet and surpass your needs.

• Release Certification Matrix (RCM) is the core of a vBlock device. The RCM ensures that all the components inside a vBlock are fully compatible and settled together
• VCE Vision is also a key into a vBlock and monitors the health of the device
• VCE have done a lot of improvement on VCE Vision regarding customer feedback. It’s like working hand in hand with VCE

Vblock™ – 3 of the World Technology Leaders Come together (something rarely seen) 

To start out I am NOT an employee for VCE/EMC/Cisco. This is based off of my own opinions and experiences. Now let’s get started 

The future of technology seems to be about effectively using datacenter resources and underutilized hardware. I believe that you need to converge infrastructure components to effectively use a datacenter. To me, a Vblock™ is basically a Technology Appliance that allows organizations to raise the bar for infrastructure utilization.

In order to maximize you’re spending (OPEX - operating expense) as well as your infrastructure utilization, you will have to have convergence and Vblock™ does this effectively. 

I also believe that Vblock™ will allow you to build and get to a cloud model in a much faster well-organized way.What I believe and have seen with the Vblock™ is that it allows an organization to move more effectively toward a Private Cloud model as well as maintain a high-level of performance to their customers. The Vblock™ alone will NOT get you to a “cloud model” but it’s a major step in the right direction. Vblock™ allows you to have a converged infrastructure that allows you to pool storage, computing and networking to optimize datacenter infrastructure (lower TCO - total cost of ownership). Seemingly, you get better performance in a black box at a lower cost. 

In my opinion Vblock™ technology allows you to virtualize and consolidate your systems while continuing to provide a high-level of performance that has been tested prior to running in your datacenter environment (validation of an outcome). Vblock™ (Standard components and devices based on my experiences): 

• Cisco UCS blade chassis 5108s. • Cisco B230s and B200s UCS Blade Models
• VMax and VNX 7500 Storage Models (EMC storage devices). 
• Cisco networking switches (6140s & 55xx) and FCOE inside UCS for connectivity (Standard Vblock™) 
• EMC RecoverPoint™ SAN replication (Block Base) with native splitters on the storage devices

Vblock™ allows an organization to standardize on what I call a ‘complete infrastructure framework/platform’ with many different components (Compute/Network/Storage). This can simplify an organization’s support as well as help companies move away from a fragmented infrastructure. This convergence (pooling) allows you to share resources to infrastructure components at the same time. 

Vblock™ allows for higher density level in a datacenter which can reduce your physical footprint. I have seen where Vblock™ technology allows cost savings by reduction in hardware maintenance cost (smaller carbon footprint) as well as consolidation on the virtual side. 

UCS manager allows companies to profile their systems for specific settings based on what application may run and where it will run (server profiles) for fast deployments and provisioning. This builds in versatility when you have hardware failures. 

Finally, Vblock™ model has allowed for ease of management from my experiences.

In addition, Vblock™ does enable disaster recovery plans/exercises and effective off-site recoverability to be more structured (i.e. simpler to perform) from my experience. That’s not only the Vblock™ but a major component of disaster recovery and business continuity. I have also experienced EMC RecoverPoint™ deployed with Vblock™ technology to perform state-full SAN replication on the backend with EMC storage to do block replication. This type of replication allows for a smaller RPO (recover point objective). I have also experienced EMC Data Domain® and Avamar® Grids deployed for effective virtual machine and database backup and restore capability. The replication from Vblock™ to Vblock™ allows us to focus on true “application” DRs vs. infrastructure DR opportunities. 

My Opinion: The Vblock™ is designed, to make IT life simpler (infrastructure framework) and more cost effective (an appliance) for an organization.

A unified platform of support, which expands easily and frees the staff to focus on our business and less on the complexities of a mixed hardware/software environment.

The XtremIO All-Flash array delivers performance, reliability, and deduplication.

I'm not so excited with Vblock solution. The only good point is that the customer does not need install anything because VCE delivers the product ready to be used.

Management solution ViZ: UCS.

I feel this is a tie between two features. VCE’s secret sauce is their release compatibility matrix which allows us to deploy updates without the need for significant testing. The second is the Cisco UCS platform which allows a simple and easy way to manage all of our compute.

VMware NSX: Provides the ability for our organisation to deliver true DR.

Its EMC storage arrays and the combined technology with Cisco in it.

UCS, brings the entire datacenter system together. We can offer non-disruptive, seamless upgrades and storage tiering for people with higher IO demands. It gives us flexibility.

• Ease of operation. 
• Access, without constraining actions. The tool is available to actually move things around, do things quickly quickly.
• The speed.
• The support behind it as well. There is always quite good support around the box. Any fixes and updates are done pretty quickly.

UCS Manager worked well for net/blade management and has allowed fairly easy use of dedicated bare-metal blades. VNX Unified performed as expected.

Capability for scale and growth within a single rack brings strong possibilities for capacity planning.