The next two weeks are going to be exciting for us, as we join both the EMC vSpecialist team (Chad’s Army) and the EMC lab team in a green-field of a type 1 vBlock, complete with Cisco Nexus 7000-series 10GE switches and a pre-release version of the EMC Ionix UIM software.

This is a critically important time for my employer as we try to find ways to accommodate and even accelerate the growth of our Enterprise Cloud business.  Now that we’ve figured out what the customers want, and what the market will sustain we are working hard to find ways to make the delivery of those services more consistent, more rapid and less people-intensive.  The vBlock has the opportunity to do that, and we’ll definitely find out how well it holds up over the next two weeks.

I plan on taking lots of pictures and blogging about the planning, design, implementation and testing phases, and I’ll report back our findings.  If there’s anything specific you’d like me to ask the vSpecialist team or Cisco, post a comment and I’ll be sure to try and get an answer.