The second Storage Wars post by Wikibon looks into the industry’s reaction to VCE, the joint effort that provides the Vblock converged infrastructure solution –it’s a combination of EMC, Cisco and VMware technology.

Vblock is leading the charge with a capacity to scale up to tens of thousands of VMs, and other vendors are closing in as they contend over market share. Their sales channels will account for a great deal in this area, Wikibon concluded, and a number of key factors are taking the spotlight in this fight.

All of the vendors listed have solutions for the mid-market customers that are covered heavily by systems integrators (SIs) and value added resellers (VARs). Virtualization is the driving factor for adoption of the stacks and there have emerged many new or restructured practices that are geared towards delivering these new converged solutions.

NetApp has one of the strongest channels,  but VCE had the head start, bringing Vblocks to market before NetApp FlexPods.  HP in turn is also tapping this market by selling VirtualSystem, the company’s own converged solution that it referred to as the “only real alternative to VCE.”  It still has a long way to go though.

All three companies have established ecosystems in the higher-end market range, where Stu Miniman pointed to service providers as a big opportunity for these vendors to make gains.

VCE is ahead in the converged infrastructure race, mostly due to the many the advantages of having EMC as a key backer. V3.0 of EMC’s Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning software, introduced alongside VMware VSphere 5 integration for Vblock in October, as well as a powerful new feature named “Elastic Provisioning.” An enhanced partnership with SAP last month added to this by increasing the solutions appeal further up the stack.