Now that Citrix is getting more serious market traction, with increased market share for its hypervisor, renewed recognition from analysis firms and additional capability to beat the market leader on time, its aggressiveness is increasing too.
Last week the company focused on the VMware | Cisco | EMC alliance dubbed VCE Coalition.
Scott Swanburg, Director of Service Provider and Cloud Computing, writes on the corporate blog:
…They call it VSphere for Cloud implementations and now VBlock for Enterprise. Take a datacenter and virtualize the servers. Take the storage arrays and provide management utilities. Drop some routers and VoIP controllers into the mix and there you have it… a complete virtualization system… or a completely backwards way of providing a usable architecture for client side virtualization. Oh yeah… after you do all of this, then all you have to do is bolt on a few thousand Virtual Machines for the users and everybody will be happy. How preposterous!
Who exactly is this [VBlock] system designed for? It surely isn’t the end user so it must be for the IT group. But if you believe what industry pundants are saying today, virtualization is all about the end user and client side of the equation. To paraphrase from Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, "IT is becoming irrelevant because it doesn’t meet the needs of the end user." So how is it that EMC, VMware and Cisco have missed the fact that IT is evolving into a Service where the end user defines the requirements and the system is built around user needs?
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Is it the telco network, or storage process that makes the iPhone the hottest selling device on the planet today? Did Steve Jobs wake up one day and tell all of his design teams, "Hey I’ve got an idea, why don’t we see if we can build a really fast and effective IT data center and then surely all of the users in the world will be happy with a kludged up interface that was an afterthought of the design"? Well the answer is obvious. If you are building a system for common people to use, you better start with what THEY want, not what makes data centers easier to manage.