I will be visiting the SAP Customer Excellence Center in Silicon Valley to followup on the work that VMware, Cisco, and EMC are doing with their joint venture VCE or VCE Coalition (previously known as Acadia). I’ll be talking to executives and customers who are pushing the envelope in this new world of cloud and converged infrastructure.

We have covered extensively the new world of virtualization at EMC World, SAP Sapphire, VMworld, Oracle Openworld, Hadoop World, and over 100 interviews with industry experts. Many videos on SiliconANGLE.tv with content from SiliconANGLE.com community, and deep research from Wikibon.org.

VMware is the product of choice for enterprise virtualization in the enterprise and there is a pressing need for an integrated stack or solution for the converged infrastructure. This is the premise of VCE.

Like any new technology products and platforms VCE is taking a classic trajectory in it’s phases of rollout.
Phase 1: Design in – companies design in the solutions to their infrastructures;
Phase 2: Deployment and value extraction – in market rollouts that provide “specific value” to the enterprise; and
Phase 3: validation and proof points – mainstream adoption.

VCE is growing fast but not talked about in the mainstream press because it’s in the design in phase for “at scale” enterprises.

The technical executive who runs the SAP Customer Excellence Center talked with me at SAP Sapphire. He goes into detail on the SAP customer lab. Hong is a great guy who is authentic in his description of what is going on at SAP Customer Excellence Center Lab

Here is another video of Hong Kwek and Ralf Lindenlaub interview at EMC World introducing the joint lab by SAP, EMC, and Cisco.

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VCE Success Real Time Beyond Proof of Concept

According to industry experts and Wikibon.org success is happening with VCE. It’s underhyped at the moment because the top enteprises are designing it in. Certainly the top vendors are scrambling to figure out how to deliver integrated stacks and solutions. Chuck Hollis from EMC outlines all of this on his blog here and Chad Sakic goes into the one year review here. Although those posts come from EMC employees I found the content very candid and transparent. Good Interesting reads and very informative.

According to Stu Miniman, research analyst at Wikibon.org. Stu wrote the following on state of VCE:

IT departments need to balance the requirement of getting a solution into production fast with the risk of making sure that everything works. Server virtualization helped with this challenge by allowing companies to spin up a virtual machine fast where applications and real company data can be tested. For large environments and critical applications, the time to design, build, test and verify a configuration can be a long and expensive process with lots of troubleshooting and adjusting of settings. The VCE Coalition has simplified this effort by having done the architectural work of Vblock configurations and by having a streamlined Proof of Concept (PoC) process that speeds up the time to get production environments online and reduces the peril of the unknown.

Testing Your Data on a Vblock

When determining if a specific environment will work on a specific infrastructure, there are varying levels of documentation and support that vendors provide. The first step is a support statement – everything from a marketing glossy such as what operating systems can run on a server, to a detailed interoperability support matrix listing all of the dot revisions and dependencies how components of a solution fit together. Even with the most thorough of specifications, there are so many variables in the IT world that customers or companies deploying a solution will have custom work to go from this documentation to a real world environment. More prescriptive documentation, such as IBM Redbooks or EMC Proven Solutions, provides guidance to building an environment for specific applications. Traditionally, even for an environment that is using server virtualization, when it is put into a production environment will require tuning, optimization, and hopefully not too much reconfiguration or changes to the infrastructure to fully deliver what is required. The VCE Coalition offers a streamlined Proof of Concept (PoC) capability free of charge where a customer’s actual data can be tested on a configuration that matches what they will deploy. PoCs are not new, but recreating what a customer environment (even from a single supplier) was complicated by all of the complexity from heterogeneous legacy environments. The proper Vblock configuration can be designed, with standard Cisco servers and networking, EMC storage and VMware software, and real customer data used and tested in approximately 1-2 months. This is much more valuable than a demo and is faster and easier for a customer or integrator than doing an on-site test.

For more on the PoC capability and Vblock solution, watch Michelle Kerby, Director of Offer Marketing with the VCE Coalition, from Oracle Open World – see the video below:

According to VCE staff, there is currently PoC capabilities in East Coast and West Coast facilities and will be expanding worldwide. The PoC capability will be especially important for solutions such as VDI or SAP (see video of Levi Strauss CIO Tom Peck discussing SAP on Vblock) where there can be risk of a failed project if the actual environment is not fully understood.

Note: Tom Peck CIO of Levi Strauss is leading the market with SAP deployments using virtualization to create a competitive IT organization that is focused on delivering business value fast for the company.

CIOs should look to leverage the transformative capability of virtualization and converged infrastructure to speed deployments and reduce operational costs for deployment.

SAP Success with VCE

The provisioning of SAP instances on a server or blade can be greatly simplified by leveraging Vblock Infrastructure Packages. The Vblock solution enables SAP administrators to manage their environment and take advantage of the benefits of virtualization technology provided by three world-class corporations – Cisco, EMC, and VMware.

Provisioning SAP instances on blades and servers is simplified through the use of service profile templates and an automation engine specifically designed for the Vblock. This allows administrators to focus on provisioning new SAP instances instead of infrastructure deployment. After deploying SAP in a virtual environment, administrators can focus more of their time re-architecting and redesigning the SAP landscape and directing more fire-power at increasing availability, performance, and SAP landscape capabilities, while enabling administrators to find better and more creative solutions to drive the business.