Storage

Cisco/EMC joint venture: private & public cloud data center strategy

Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a joint venture called “Acadia” to promote a new vision of the data center, built on virtualization and presumably cloud-ready elements. Intel will also have a small stake in the deal. The core of this venture is an architecture built on technology from all three, who form what they call the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Coalition.

The “product” is a set of Vblock Infrastructure Packages that are essentially ready-to-install combinations of software and hardware to support security, virtualization, networking, computing and storage. Acadia will sell, install and sustain this as the customer requires, and we’re hearing they have their first contracts in the bag in Asia and the EU, with one in the U.S. likely coming within 45 days.

The concept is also targeted at both private and public clouds, and in this aspect it could be the basis for something highly interesting to service providers and even somewhat competitive as a service-layer technology. So far none of the players seem to be positioning Acadia as a generalized solution for the service layer, and we can’t find any indication of new products other than element management for the Vblocks, but the value of the package concept is considerable for users whose needs fit in the framework of the three Vblock configurations.

Professional services and a developer ecosystem are also provided; the latter may be where service-layer technology comes into the picture. We think that a service-layer extension to the VCE concept could put a lot of pressure on other network vendors. Ericsson has no real announced strategy, Alcatel-Lucent and NSN have strategies they’re not really opening up on, and Juniper has just announced a major service-layer innovation. All of these would need to accommodate whatever positioning Cisco might make.

Juniper/Dell OEM deal validates rising IT power in the data center

Juniper has announced an OEM deal with Dell that will have the latter re-skinning the MX, EX, and SRX products and offering them as a part of the Dell PowerConnect brand. The deal is a validation of the truth we articulated this time last year: Data center IT is now powering data center networking from an enterprise political perspective.

That means network vendors need an IT hook, and Dell offers Juniper another one (Juniper has a deal with IBM). One interesting slant on this is that Dell has other deals with Cisco and Brocade, and both of those make sense given the strong position those companies have in data center and storage networking. But Juniper is a relative up-and-coming.

Since Juniper made a big deal of its Stratus fabric for the data center at its analyst event in early spring, it may be that Dell sees Juniper as having a strengthening role. Juniper is also a leader in financial applications that require low latency, which is a sector every data center player is interested in. Dell and Juniper will also partner on Data Center Bridging, an extension to Ethernet that provides the lossless transfer that’s needed for data center storage and virtualization applications. DCB is also something that some operators are looking at as a cloud data center service.

AT&T storage service based on the cloud

AT&T and EMC are partnering to offer cloud storage service based on the EMC Atmos product set. The offering is called Synaptic Storage as a Service and appears to be targeted at enterprise applications like datacenter backup, but it is also likely a step by AT&T into a broader cloud computing offer. We’re hearing that Verizon has similar plans in the US, and that BT, FT, DT, KT, and NTT are also looking at storage and cloud computing internationally.

DOCSIS 3.0 pushes U.S. broadband speed wars

Cablevision is planning to launch a 101/15 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 broadband service, which would be the fastest available in the U.S., at a price of $99 per month. The service will launch in NYC suburbs, an area where Verizon has gained strongly with FiOS.

It’s expected that cable will be pushing speed limits up this year, since DSL services can’t begin to match DOCSIS 3.0 performance, and only Verizon among the U.S. RBOCs has the regional demographics to make FTTH widely suitable. This could be good news for equipment vendors, because nothing other than competition is likely to provoke investment in wireline broadband given the low ROI.