Before a crowd of media, analysts, partners and customers in San Francisco on Friday, EMC CMO Jeremy Burton ended speculation about the teaser that had been running on the emc.com home page for the past couple of weeks: What starts with “v” and ends with “x”?
And, no, the answer wasn’t vortex, vertex or (thankfully) varix (but feel free to leverage these words in your next game of “Words for Friends”). Nor was it VMAX, VPLEX or VNX, or for that matter Vblock.
The answer…VSPEX
What is VSPEX? It’s a set of specifications (“SPEX”) for virtualized (“V”) environments. Think reference architecture. Think cloud computing. Think SME. Think channel.
Without getting into technology specifics or configurations (I’ll leave that to my product marketing and management counterparts on this and other EMC blogs to cover in separate posts), VSPEX integrates leading virtualization, server networking, storage and data protection into a single efficient, scalable solution that can be easily consumed by small to medium-sized organizations.
The 14 initial VSPEX configurations Burton and team discussed leverage technologies from key partners Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Intel, Microsoft and VMware and feature EMC storage (VNX and VNXe) and data protection (Avamar and Data Domain) solutions.
Why VSPEX?
We all know that SMEs have many of the same pain points as larger organizations as well as many of the same business objectives, but they generally don’t have the resources (people and staff) to achieve them that larger organizations do.
VSPEX allows customers get to take advantage of best-of-breed technologies in easy-to-deploy and manage packages, the channel to develop and deliver solutions that are really customized for this segment of the market and technology providers (like us) to expand the reach of portfolios down-market, to accelerate cloud initiatives there. Win, win, win.
The survey says…
According to the Enterprise Strategy Group’s just-published “2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey,” when it comes to their virtualized computing infrastructure:
- While nearly have said they took a “Do It Yourself” approach – that is, they built out virtualization infrastructures of out of separate servers, storage, networking hypervisor software and management software, 36% of you would prefer to deploy “fully-integrated solutions” – that is, pre-packaged solutions sold and serviced by a single vendor.
For more information about the benefits of the new VSPEX infrastructure, the configurations that are being offered and how you can get them, check out the extensive coverage on our website. You can also find more information about the Avamar and Data Domain components here on The Backup Window or on our recently revamped backup and recovery solutions web pages. Of course, I’m always here to answer your questions or direct you to someone who can.
