VMware and Cisco and EMC, oh my

September 1, 2009 – There’s a rumor swirling at this week’s VMworld show regarding the imminent announcement of a deep, formal partnership between VMware, Cisco and EMC (aka VCE).

The troika already has a loose relationship, but scuttlebutt suggests a much more formidable triumvirate. The announcement might come at VMworld this week, although next week may be more likely.

Paul Mansky, a principal in equity research, data center infrastructure, at CANACCORD Adams, issued a note this week that hints at what the three-way relationship might entail.

Citing industry sources, Mansky says the deal will revolve around Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) platform and, of course, EMC storage systems (with an emphasis on Atmos?) and VMware in bundled configurations that address cloud computing (internal or external) environments. The venture is also expected to include joint testing and marketing, as well as a road show in September or October.

Interestingly, sources also say that EMC plans to compensate both EMC and Cisco field reps for 100% of the value of the combined solution sale.

If anybody doubted whether Cisco’s UCS would gain traction, this deal would put those notions to rest.

Q1 the worst ever for VARs

April 20, 2009 – The channel bid adieu to the first quarter of this year with a collective “good riddance.” That’s one takeaway from a recent survey of 51 IT resellers conducted by Robert W. Baird & Co.

How bad was it? In terms of expected revenues vs. actual revenues, 60% of the VARs were below plan, 26% were on plan, and only 14% were above plan. That’s the worst quarter since RW Baird began its quarterly server/storage VAR surveys in Q3 2004. In fact, it was almost twice as bad as the previous worst quarters (Q2 2006 and Q1 2008, when about 32% of the resellers were below plan).

Once again, storage was cited as the strongest IT sector by resellers, with virtualization and data de-duplication cited as the hottest technologies.

It’s tough to predict how VARs will fare in the second quarter. About 43% of the survey respondents expect the market to remain about the same, while 30% are more negative and 16% are more positive (and 11% say it’s too early to tell). On the positive side, many VARs said that, although many purchases were delayed from Q1 to Q2, relatively few purchases were cancelled.

When asked which vendors’ products they expect to sell more of in the next 12 months, VARs cited VMware, NetApp, Data Domain and Cisco as the top four performers, with CommVault and LeftHand rounding out the top six.

When asked about specific vendors in the short term (“How do you perceive the following storage vendors in the next 3 to 6 months?”), Data Domain, NetApp and EMC topped the list, with LeftHand moving into the fourth position from seventh in the previous quarter. (LeftHand was also ranked the most channel friendly vendor, slightly above NetApp.)

Sun ranked consistently low in the survey, and it will be interesting to see how the channel reacts to the Oracle-Sun announcement. I”ll blog about that news as soon as I get done scratching my head.

Application-centric storage challenges SANs

I’m in the process of editing an interesting, and perhaps controversial, article by Andrew Reichman, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. It’s based on his report, “Do You Really Need a SAN Anymore?” and makes the argument that application-centric storage may prove to be a viable alternative to traditional SAN architectures.

“Application-centric storage” is when application vendors embed storage functionality into their code to handle some, or many, of the functions typically handled by disk array vendors or third-party software vendors. As such, storage is managed from within the application itself.

I sincerely doubt that application-centric storage will challenge SANs, but in some cases it could make a lot of sense. And don’t underestimate the storage plans or capabilities of vendors such as VMware, Microsoft and Oracle.

Here are some examples, which I’m lifting from the article:

Oracle offers branded storage hardware under the Exadata label. Using its Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature to control the flow of data between application servers, and storage servers provided by technology partner HP, the Exadata system is a hybrid of software and industry standard hardware that Oracle will sell directly.

Microsoft recommends DAS for Exchange 2007. Exchange has long had a best practice for configuration that precluded adding other workloads to the storage array it runs on, which has served to put it on an island. Now, with the addition of Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), the application can manage its own high availability and replication.

VMware offers native storage management capabilities. The virtualization market leader continues to add storage features to its application stack. For example, VMFS offers volume management capabilities within virtual machine management, and VMware recently announced vStorage, which includes native thin provisioning and other key storage features. While many of the storage features within VMware leverage SAN array capabilities, the control and management is substantially shifted to the application realm.

Leading application vendors probably won’t rock the SAN boat, but it’s quite possible that they’ll provide some worthy competition to the pure-play storage hardware/software vendors.