EMC was the first company to begin offering bundled storage, server and networking solutions. Its vBlock architecture is a combination of products brought together through its VCE partnership with Cisco and VMware, a subsidiary of EMC. NetApp followed suit with its FlexPod offering, which like EMC signed an exclusive deal with Cisco for its VCE platform. Hewlett-Packard with its VirtualSystem and Dell with vStart bundles also chimed in.
Beyond traditional storage and systems vendors, a new breed of start-ups are creating pre-configured systems, such as SimpliVity's OmniCube, Scale Computing's HC3 and Nutanix's Complete Cluster.
Ravi Chalaka, HDS's vice president of solutions marketing, said HDS's new UCP offering will save users time and money, not in the material costs, but in time wasted in purchasing, configuring and testing a architecture.
"It can take as long as 18 to 24 months to bring one on line and that's a lot of energy and cost that IT organizations would like to avoid," he said.
Along with the hardware and hypervisors, the new converged architecture comes with UCP Director, a VMware vCenter integrated management console, which offers a single view of both physical and virtual environments.
UCP Director, a console tightly integrated with VMware's vCenter
UCP Director allows administrators to provision server, network or storage capacity using RESTful APIs and offering real-time monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities.
"Now storage admins can focus on other jobs, such as better storage planning or setting up disaster recovery protection," Chalaka said.
