Best In Class Hardware (Anything to Show for It?)

Best In Class HardwareIn all, I’ve probably been to 75 or more Cisco, HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, and other Best in Class hardware vendor demos where they were pitching VMware solutions…

…and to be honest, they were all pretty good – but that’s expected for Best in Class Hardware vendors, right?

Now, tally up the cost for Best in Class and the overall TCO for virtual infrastructure has just given the business reason to move to commodity cloud services such as AWS. Or to white box server hardware for virtualization.

Related VMware Hardware Topic in the News

While browsing the news today, I found an article on TechCrunch ridiculing VMware’s new CEO & COO.

Let’s see if I can pull it back up, here it is:

VMware’s Top Executives Attack Amazon, But The Cries Are Hollow At Best by none other than, ALEX WILLIAMS, who always seems to blast VMware and plug AWS.

Related reading: Learn more about whitebox server hardware 

From my standpoint, I see both sides of this.

On the side (A) we have Amazon being a book store dominating the public cloud by selling commodity cloud services…

…and on the side (B) we have VMware being the leader in enterprise virtualization that prides itself on Best in Class built private clouds.

Hmm… How do you compete with commodity when you’re best in class?

Here’s how my simple brain processes this…

If people are moving to AWS because of low cost (obtained through commodity hardware), yet most vSphere environments are being built on best in class hardware such as Cisco UCS and HP C7000 Blade and Chassis with high-end NetApp or EMC storage, on end-to-end Cisco Nexus Networks. Why is it not obvious what the problem is?

My Rationale:

You don’t need best in class hardware to have a great cloud, AWS and Google have both already proven that.

So the solution must be to build a VMware vCloud on low cost commodity hardware too!

Conclusion:

Why do so many data center projects keep buying all this expensive hardware…

…without anything to show for it?

Solve this problem and the book store doesn’t have a chance!

Leave a Reply