Since joining EMC a few weeks ago and becoming actively involved with the VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) Vblock product I have spoken with a number TechHead readers and friends working in the IT industry who have asked me what a Vblock actually is?  There seems to be a popular misconception that the Vblock is something of a sealed magical virtualization black box that gets wheeled into a data centre, that is then turned on and left to whir away.  Although the latter is correct, as it does just sit in your data centre ‘whirring away’ quite happily, the ‘magical black box’ part is not quite true.  Sure, what it can do is rather cool and magical but what a Vblock is in fact comprised of is a number of tried and tested “best of breed” hardware and software components from VMware, Cisco and EMC which work together to create the resulting Vblock.  I liken it to baking a rather tasty cake, use the best ingredients from the well known suppliers to get the best results.  In the case of the Vblock:  Blade servers + Storage + Networking + Hypervisor + Management Software (plus a few other bits and pieces thrown in for good measure).  Now Stir… 

To be honest before starting at EMC I didn’t really have a deep-level of knowledge on what a Vblock was made up of and how it ticked, particularly around the Cisco UCS side of things, though this has now changed after the intensive and rather exciting EMC induction process I am currently involved with.  I thought I’d take the opportunity over a couple of blog posts to pass-on some of what I have learnt about the Vblock as it provides an innovative new way of looking at purchasing compute resource (in my geeky opinion).

The Vblock comes in a number of different flavours, each model designed to best match a particular level of work-load or requirement.  I have a blog post coming up soon which will go into more detail on these different models of Vblock, though in the meantime who better to run through a high level overview of the new Vblock 0 than well known virtualization blogger and author Scott Lowe and RSA security aficionado Mike Foley, both of whom I had the good fortune of meeting up with during my recent visit to EMC World 2010 in Boston.

So, if your interested in finding out what makes up the new Vblock 0 then check out the TechHead video below.