Getting From Here to There
I’ve been spending a lot of time on my local commuter railway system recently. In my previous jobs, I never had the opportunity to do this, since I always found myself driving across multiple locations within a day, none of which were convenient for mass transit. With my new company, however, I find that my office and my customers are all in the downtown area, affording me the opportunity to take the train system each way on a near daily basis. I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking about converged or stack infrastructures, and the various approaches in the industry to providing these offerings to customers.
What are you paying for?
When I board the train, and hand the conductor my ticket, I had to really think about what I was paying for, and what I was getting in return. For the price of my ticket, I get the following value:
- Arrival downtown and back at a time that has a high level of predictability
- An hour of time (each way) where I can focus my attention on something other than transit.
But What Are You Actually Buying?
The key distinction here is that I’m not buying a train ticket, I am buying the resulting value. The physical ticket is just a representation, or receipt, of that value. In agreeing to this value, I also give up some customization of my travel experience. I no longer have the right to choose the route that is taken. I have to board the train at a designated station, and at a designated time. I also have had to change some of my commuting skillsets. Whereas I no longer focus on traffic and routes, I instead have become keenly aware of departure schedules. Overall, what I have noticed is that I am spending much less time on the common task of commuting, and much more reclaimed time on higher level tasks, such as reading or blogging (though some who read my material might argue the benefit there). There are also some things I love giving up, such as the additional mileage on my car, and increased vehicle maintenance.
All Aboard the Vblock Train
So in many ways, the Vblock architecture offered by the VCE group is like the commuter train. They deliver the value of infrastructure services, quickly and efficiently. The time they return to you allows you to focus on other, higher value tasks in your environment. You will note that you aren’t buying Cisco UCS, Nexus, EMC and VMware per se, but instead those are just the physical instantiation or ticket representing your value. In return, they ask you to give up some focus on customization of your experience (i.e. only VMs can be deployed, and only certain components are certified), and they ask you to change some of your operational procedures to focus on service delivery tasks. Also note that the train is not for everyone, as many commuters still require high levels of customization, or have needs that the train cannot fulfill. For those customers, a piece part design is still the right fit. Many IT shops still find this is appropriate for some or all of their environment, but like commuting I find a lot of people who are more than willing to give that up.
So how do you prefer to get to your destination?
Very astute