On June 22, 2017, Dell EMC’s Chad Sakac announced through his blog, Virtual Geek, that as of July 1, 2017, VBlock will no longer be offered, and that the singular converged infrastructure (CI) solution will be VxBlock. Dell EMC will continue to provide support for the next 5 years (depending on when you bought the system, and which system you bought). Sakac comments that “the distinction  between the two is whether or not they use the Nexus 1000v software 3rd party distributed switch(Vblock) or the VMware Distributed Switch (VxBlock).” He further comments that over 90% of customers have chosen VxBlock since its release.

This comes as no surprise to Neuralytix. Cisco has stepped up its partnerships with other CI and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), including Nutanix and NetApp. In fact, NetApp announced a new FlexPod reference architecture (RA) integrating SolidFire in place of the traditional FAS file/block systems based on ONTAP. That said, Dell EMC will continue to offer the choice of VMware NSX or Cisco’s ACI.

With the change in leadership at both Cisco and EMC (now Dell EMC), the dynamic between Cisco and Dell EMC has changed considerably. Cisco has aggressively sought out software defined datacenter (SDDC) partners such as Nutanix, HPE SimpliVity, Pure Storage and others. At the same time, Dell’s merger with EMC has showed equal aggression in ensuring that the components stay in the Dell Technologies stable.

Neuralytix believes that more consolidation of platforms are likely to happen where legacy EMC had leveraged non Dell Technologies partners; and where Dell had leverage non EMC components for storage solutions.

VBlock had been the original CI, going back to 2009/2010. It will be sad to see the retirement of the name, but the party continues. Neuralytix considers VBlock/VxBlock to be the leader in CI.