Virtual Computing Environment Coalition

BlueWater Communications Group, a top tier partner with Cisco, EMC and VMware, became a charter member of the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition in November of 2009. The VCE coalition, formed jointly by Cisco and EMC with VMware, represents an unprecedented level of collaboration in development, services, and partner enablement to facilitate an organization's infrastructure virtualization transformation to maximize the benefits of a private cloud environment.

This shared vision for cloud computing will help establish critical standards and metrics resulting in quicker, more seamless, and more productive private cloud implementations. The objective is to combine the reliability, security and control of traditional data centers with the flexibility, scalability and on-demand computing of a cloud environment. In order to recognize all the benefits of true virtualization high levels of integration in the network, storage, compute and application virtualization environments are required. Having the three industry leaders team up in this fashion enables BlueWater to provide industry leading, standardized solutions for data centers that feature tight integration between all infrastructure environments providing greater scalability, availability and performance.

VBlock Infrastructure Offerings

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are integrated IT offerings from the VCE coalition that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, compute, storage, security, and management technologies with end-to-end vendor accountability. Pre-integrated to provide a new way of delivering IT to businesses, these offerings are validated to help enable the creation of customized solution packages and pave the way for companies to move toward pervasive virtualization and private cloud environments; thereby reducing their operating expenses and improving performance and availability.

BlueWater has integrated this architecture into the Virtualization offerings designed and delivered by their Data Center Solutions Group and have developed additional services to help clients evaluate their environment for virtualization readiness, and streamline implementation.

"Many of our clients have been exploring the best route to reducing OpEx, while improving availability, performance and scalability in their data center," says Eric Ustaoglu, Director of BlueWater’s Data Center Solutions Group. "The coalition now provides an industry standard roadmap that will enable our clients to realize the promise of virtualization."

Vblock 2 is designed to support 3,000 to 6,000 virtual machines using Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus 1000v as well as EMC's Symmetrix V-max storage (Secured by RSA) and VMware's vSphere platform.

Vblock 1 supports  800 to 3,000 virtual machines to deliver a broad range of IT capabilities to organizations of all sizes. Vblock  1 uses a similar configuration to Vblock 2, with EMC's Clariion storage ( Secured by RSA) instead of the Symmetrix V-max.

VBlock 0, available in 2010, will support 300-800 virtual machines. This solution provides benefits of a private cloud into medium-sized businesses and data centers.