VCE Adds Cisco's ACI to Vblock Converged Infrastructure

Converged infrastructure vendor VCE unveiled new Vblock systems with networking capabilities to support Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Combined with VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software, the new systems can be built with Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches, which will be the first ACI-enabled switches.

Cisco announced ACI in 2013. It was the software defined networking product of Cisco's "spin-in" Insieme Networks, which the networking giant acquired last year. ACI is radically different in approach to SDN than the one that dominates the SDN movement, which is centered around the open SDN protocol OpenFlow.

The new VCE Vblock Systems 340 and 720 with Cisco Nexus 9000-series switches are available for ordering immediately. VCE said they will be ACI-enabled upon general availability of Cisco APIC later this year.

Research from Wikibon shows that the converged systems market will reach $402 billion by 2017. VCE recently announced that it surpassed its 2013 goal of generating $1 billion in annual sales. VCE's roots grow out of Cisco, which created the company together with EMC, VMware and Intel to sell Vblock. The product combines Cisco's Unified Computing System servers and switches, EMC storage and VMware virtualization software.

Todd Pavone, VCE's executive vice president for product strategy and development, said, “Combining the value ofVblock Systems with Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, we can now deliver a holistic architecture with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles, resulting in greater application predictability and availability with significantly lower costs.”

VCE Vblock systems with Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Nexus 9000 switches will automate provisioning of the complete application deployment lifecycle. These "ACI-ready" Vblock systems will take full advantage of policy-based templates that automate the provisioning of network resources, application services, security, segmentation and workload placement.

Vblock systems are individually optimized for a variety of workloads. Its modular architecture scales as workloads increase, giving a means to cost-efficiently extend compute, network or storage resources to increase performance and capacity.