Liquid Computing Vies For VAR Attention
Amid an ocean of unified computing options, Liquid Computing is looking for a little respect. No surprise, CEO Vikram Desai wants VARs to look beyond VBlock (the Cisco, EMC and VMware data center initiative) media coverage. Especially since his company is set to launch a formal partner program in 2010. Here’s why VARs might want to pay attention.
Desai was a bit glib when discussing what you might find from a Cisco solution. He prodded at the VBLock announcement in November 2009 and suggested that the trio (Cisco, EMC and VMware) would trigger more headaches than happiness.
Desai’s remedy? No surprise: Liquid Elements. Elements allegedly does away with the idea that an entire unified computing solution has to come from one source (e.g. Cisco). Elements, he says, allows the data center manger to keep their vendor relationship (with such options as Intel and NetApp) and manage the entire infrastructure from servers to storage.
Liquid’s solution involves a 4U mountable device. A single cable connects Intel’s Xeon 5500-based SR1680MV 1U rack server to the device. Desai made it sound easy as plug and play. He says Elements is essentially a big load balancing box that controls traffic between switches, storage and servers while managing the whole thing.
Elements does everything “beyond what Cisco has,” Desai asserts, saying Elements is flexible — accommodating experimental software environments and virtualized software environments while Cisco’s solutions allegedly can’t “provision and control storage.” Hmmm… He’s taking a lot of shots at Cisco so we’ll be sure to give the networking giant equal time in a future blog.
When I asked Desai for a bottom line take away, he shot right off and stated Liquid’s solutions are easy to design and implement and VARs and customers aren’t locked down to a single brand.
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Vic was an idiot, he changed the dynamics of liquid computing and in 12 months killed the company.