[stephengillie]

Vblock is a management and communication nightmare. It runs on an independent AD domain with no integration with your own environment. It's just like having your own hardware in your own rack, but you have to call them to fix what you'd just normally fix internally. You have to have people who know VMWare, Cisco, and SAN to run one, more efficient to just set up a vCenter.

[parasubvert]

You can fix a VBlock yourself quite fine if you stay within its constraints, though the point is to get out of the business of fixing this stuff yourself - it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. Wire and walk away as a transition towards data center zero. Yes theyre isolated by design, but unified management isnt hard to do. I've seen places save tens of millions getting off IBM or EDS outsourcing replaced with converged.

[stephengillie]

Well, if you're consolidating by replacing five vendors with one, that can have cost savings in unified billing and administration alone, and simplified environment management - one stop for all your server needs - is indeed another benefit.

I've been a contractor for a firm that still runs their own mainframe for data transformation, and had Cisco experts on the payroll. They ran their own vCenter instances integrated with their Active Directory, so moving with them to Vblock was painful mostly in giving up control.