Cisco, EMC, VMware form private cloud pact

The current ratio of the amount that IT spends on maintaining IT systems versus driving innovation has become unsustainable, according to EMC Australia president David Webster.

“The information technology industry needs to change because the dynamics of the IT industry are unsustainable -- particularly as it relates to data centre operations,” Webster said, speaking at the keynote to EMC’s Inform conference held in Sydney today.

“When you spend 77 percent of your budget in keeping the business running and only spend 23 percent on innovation it is out of whack. Management is saying so much is spent on keeping to the lights on that they cannot support change.”

Webster said EMC, Cisco and VMware had formed a triumvirate to enable this change, aimed at cutting costs and gaining greater efficiencies through the joint provision of the technology underpinning private clouds.

Webster also claimed that recent, coinciding announcements from VMware on its vSphere 4 virtual data centre operating system, Cisco on its unified computing system (UCS), and EMC’s new V-Max storage platform, all herald a turning point in the IT industry.

“You will look back in 10 years’ time and remember that May/June ‘09 the industry fundamentally changed, because the technologies that had previously held back change, enabled change to occur,” he said. “We must reverse the 77/23 dynamic.”

Webster said current data centres would need to adopt more characteristics of the cloud -- such as flexibility and on-demand provisioning and payment -- if they were to enable organisational change.

“Many organisations have started the journey,” he said. “They have started phase one: they are thinking about virtualisation as it relates to servers, their storage environment and their desktops.”

“But, the requirement now is not to suddenly shift and begin building the data centre of the future. It’s not about ripping and replacing everything you have invested in already. It’s about incrementally evolving to the new capabilities.”

Kevin Bloch, CTO at Cisco ANZ said that the announced relationship with EMC, Cisco and VMware would see genuine integration and co-development between the three vendors.

“What we are talking about is not marketing -- it’s hundreds of person-years of code and development working together on genuine capabilities. . . such as the Nexus 1000v switch,” he said.

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