Cisco, EMC, and vmware make alliance official

CNET News -

Nov-05-2009

Cisco, EMC, and vmware make alliance official

(topic overview)
CONTENTS:

Necessity makes strange bedfellows. (More...)
SalesForce.com uses multi-tenant software and Google uses parallel programming. (More...)
The VBlock infrastructure packages combine products from all three vendors and will start at the entry level market for small data centres and rise up to mid-size configurations and large enterprises. (More...)
The timing of a hodge-podge of system announcements that HP is stacking up against the Vblock stacks and whatever integrated systems Oracle and Sun Microsystems might cook up if the European Commission ever allows the Sun acquisition to go through. (More...)
People working on virtual computers get the performance and appearance of an independent machine while actually sharing servers, meaning businesses spend less on equipment, energy and maintenance. (More...)
For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com. (More...)
The move aims to boost Cisco's share on the market for computing products, consulting and maintenance. (More...)
With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 150,000 customers and 22,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. (More...)
Even if the customers work directly with the EMC support teams, our intent is to have the partners handle the business." (More...)
Bangalore: If Howard Charney, senior vice-president, Cisco Systems Inc, is to be believed, it should be a cakewalk to take on IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the cloud, given that it is more network-centric than the rival giants, which are server-centric. (More...)
A private cloud is a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. (More...)
The emphasis, according to the coompanies, is on freeing corporate buyers and carriers from being locked-in to any one supplier or technology. (More...)
Easily Monitor Virtual, Physical, and Cloud based assets, applications and services from a unified Dashboard with up.time. (More...)
SourceMedia is an Investcorp company. (More...)

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Necessity makes strange bedfellows. It what is a bold move by three of the leading manufacturers in the IT industry Cisco Systems Inc. , EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. have formed a coalition to push virtualization and private cloud solutions through the channel. The three companies are calling this alliance a virtual computing coalition. Their objectives are to rapidly push customers towards a fully virtualized data centres or private clouds. According to Mitch Breen, senior vice president, global channel strategy and sales for EMC (NYSE: EMC), based in Hopkinton, Mass., this coalition is different from any other type of partnership or alliance that you typically see in this industry because the three firms made four significant investments together. They are: A unified customer engagement model, the VBlock infrastructure packages that have been validated, tested and ready to go for a best of breed solution, a joint venture called Acadia and a combined channel partner ecosystem. 'Today customers need help for private clouds and they either go to a vertically integrated company or a technology company for it. The customer is then left to piece it all together and this coalition is the best of both worlds,' Breen said. [1] Joe Tucci, EMC's president CEO and chairman, got to say a few words, as did Paul Maritz, president and CEO of EMC subsidiary VMware. Chambers likes to wax poetic, and he said that he believed that when we all look back five years from now, we would see that the coalition between EMC and Cisco was a pivotal moment for data centers. IT vendors are always saying things like this, of course. After ribbing Tucci about only giving Cisco a few per cent stake in VMware, Cisco's commander said customers of EMC and Cisco alike had been asking for them to offer a more integrated setup for virtualized server and storage. Customers, in a "not too gentle nudge," Chambers said, have been telling them if they just integrated the components, they would buy more. Hence, with Vblock infrastructure stacks, they are doing just that. Chambers said, he knows the history of the IT market. "Most strategic coalitions have a higher degree of failure than acquisitions," he admitted, and later in the call he said that acquisitions were only successful about 10 per cent of the time. This coalition - formally known as the Virtual Computing Environment coalition and that is not the same thing as the Acadia joint venture - different.[2]

The venture will peddle the stacks, called Vblocks, for companies who want to buy preconfigured virtual and cloudy infrastructure. The three companies have been working out their strategy for private cloud computing - based on Cisco's "California" blade and rack servers, converged Ethernet switches for server and storage networking, VMware's vSphere server virtualization, and EMC's storage - for the past year. They are working together to fill in the respective gaps in each others' product lines and to chase what they see as a $350bn data centre infrastructure opportunity, of which they reckon about $85bn of which will be virtualized x64 gear that the Acadia partnership will peddle. The companies will host a briefing on Acadia later today, but in the press release, they say they will offer pre-integrated and validated virtualized infrastructure. They claim this speeds up deployment and, presumably, also cuts the cost of deployment because of the integration that is done by Acadia. You can bet that EMC and Cisco will keep most of those cost savings as profits - much as Cisco is trying to profit from converged server and storage networks on its Nexus switches and California integrated server and networking systems.[3] Cisco, EMC and VMware Tuesday unveiled Vblock Infrastructure Packages, a series of preconfigured, pretested solutions based on Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) and networking switches, EMC's Symmetrix or Clariion storage arrays and VMware's vSphere server virtualization platform. They are aimed at helping customers build virtual data centers and private computing clouds.[4] Tuesday's announcement by Cisco, EMC and VMware of the establishment of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition to drive pervasive data center virtualization and accelerate the transition to private cloud infrastructures is a very big deal for all the vendors involved. The three companies' CEOs optimistically stated their intentions to take their customers and our partners on a journey to the private cloud, and help customers transition their datacenters of today to fully virtualized data centers of tomorrow.[5] The problem could be displacing existing vendors. "EMC Ionix may be building for the future, but its competition is present in the data centers today and may be difficult to dislodge tomorrow," the report states. Not all industry watchers are convinced the coalition will enable the three vendors to advance their management and other technology efforts via partnerships with third-party vendors, not directly involved with the Virtual Computing Environment coalition. "It seems like EMC and Cisco are trying to merge without merging -- and dragging VMware along for the ride. Even if they can pull off the coalition, I think it will be challenging for either the coalition or the individual companies to effectively partner with any other vendor," says Jasmine Noel, principal analyst and co-founder of Ptak, Noel and Associates. "It will be interesting to see whether VMware's leading market share is sustainable as other partner relations cool off.[6]

"Infrastructure I can trust -- a brand I can trust -- that's what I see as the difference here," Wolf said. VCE pitches simplicity Cisco, EMC and VMware said their new Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition will offer reference architectures for so-called Vblock Infrastructure Packages comprising Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) servers running VMware vSphere, Cisco Ethernet and Fibre Channel networking equipment including the Nexus 1000V, and EMC storage, security and management software. The VCE coalition partners will also offer integrated pre-sales service and post-sales support for their Vblocks.[7] According to the sources aware of the companies' plans, the coalition surrounds the new range of products, dubbed as 'vBlock', and it would help the duo position better against the major rivals, including IBM and HP, which have comparatively broader range of offerings in the cloud computing sphere. The sources further mentioned that while Cisco would offer networking gear and server computers to the vBlock range, EMC would be responsible for providing storage equipment along with virtualisation technology from its software subsidiary VMware. The announcement for such a coalition between the two companies can come as early as next week, the sources added. Taking the recent surveys and forecasts by analyst companies that predict the rapid growth of cloud computing technology in the coming years, such collaboration between Cisco and EMC could help both companies to take the advantage of this big imminent future shift.[8] BOSTON (Reuters) - Tech heavyweights Cisco Systems Inc and EMC Corp dampened speculation of a merger as they unveiled a partnership to take on rivals Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM. The companies have spent three years developing technology and ironing out the details of a deep partnership through which they will bundle Cisco's networking equipment and server computers with EMC's storage and virtualization technology. Their goal is to become a top provider of data center products as the industry switches to "cloud" computing services, where data is stored on central servers that can be accessed over the Internet and corporate networks.[9] Cisco Systems took another step to expand its computer hardware businesses on Tuesday by forming a broad partnership with EMC, a maker of storage equipment and software. The two companies announced on Tuesday that they had created a joint venture called Acadia that would work to sell their data center equipment to businesses. The new venture will focus on designing and building systems that rely on virtualization technology, which can help customers create a more flexible technology infrastructure and lower their capital spending costs. For Cisco, the arrangement should aid the company's efforts to sell its nascent line of computer servers and increase competition against the likes of Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M. and Dell.[10] The long rumored partnership between networking giant and server wannabe Cisco Systems, server virtualization juggernaut VMware, and storage powerhouse (and VMware owner) EMC will be announced this week, according to various reports. The three companies have been rumored to be working on some sort of formal joint venture to jointly take on the data center since August, when they said in a vague announcement that they would sell virtualized data centers together. There have also been rumors swirling around that Cisco and EMC would create a joint venture, code-named Alpine, that would take assets from both companies and create its own sales force and channel to peddle products and offer integrated support and custom services to large data center operators.[11] The Dow Jones report says that the joint venture will be announced ahead of Cisco's first quarter of fiscal 2010 financial results, due Wednesday. It also says that the venture will sell, maintain, and support the combined vBlock product line and that the joint venture will have its own chief executive officer and, presumably, some freedom to integrate and peddle specific products to meet data center needs. By selling its converged products through a joint venture that is at least somewhat separated from the three companies, Cisco, EMC, and VMware can claim to still be neutral when it comes to other partners. The reality is that Cisco is a networking vendor that long since branched out into storage and now servers and EMC is a storage vendor that has branched out into servers with its Ionix management tools and, of course, its acquisition of VMware. If Cisco and EMC really want to take on IBM and Hewlett-Packard for hegemony in the data center, they should just merge and get it over with. No one does old-fashioned mergers anymore - even if they might be good for the resulting companies in the long run - because no one gets rich quick off a merger.[11]

The networking giant is partnering with storage king EMC and virtualization software leader VMWare. Their goal: to meld the companies' products into more integrated, efficient offerings, to decrease the headaches for customers that now have to cobble together their own servers, software, storage and networking gearor pay big premiums to IT services providers to do it for them. The focus is on selling pre-configured, pre-tested "v-blocks," for customers that want to use standardized data center building blocks (otherwise, they can choose from the three companies' existing product lines). The companies say they are also melding their sales and support teams, and have even created a joint venture that will work with big customers to design customized data centers to solve their particular problems.[12] With the $350-billion-a-year market for core computing products, consulting and maintenance being currently dominated Hewlett-Packard (HP) and IBM, Cisco's partnership with EMC and EMC's majority-owned VMware would likely cause quite a few ripples. At present, Cisco is way behind its competitors in terms of the flexible and cost-effective 'virtualization' technique. Rumors mills have, in the recent past, been abuzz with the reports of a proposed joint venture between Cisco and EMC. The venture would reportedly take assets from both companies and create its own sales force and channel for the aim of marketing virtualized data centers, along with offering integrated support and custom services to large data center operators.[13]

More broadly speaking, don't look for the coalition to push Azure, the data center operating system at the hear of Microsoft's own cloud strategy. Even more interesting is the impact on Cisco's all-out war with HP, and its weakening partnership with IBM. Both of those companies used to resell billions of Cisco gear, but are increasingly pushing other brands (HP has its own line, and Big Blue has a partnership with Juniper). Could the coalition put Cisco in any favored position with VMWare and EMCboth key partners for these big computer makers? And Chambers suggests that the coalition's approach will drive plenty of services business for its partnerspotentially taking some from IBM and HP, who make a huge part of their money in this market. That's not an empty threat. Many times in the past, Cisco has helped pioneer new marketsnot only through new products (usually acquired from some hot start-up), but by creating the necessary services to help customers take advantage of them. That's how Cisco went from nowhere to No. 1 in the corporate phone market, for example.[12] According to the group, the coalition was created "to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures." Without saying it, one can only assume it was also created to help these companies better compete against the likes of IBM and HP, which both sell a much broader array of datacenter equipment than either Cisco or EMC alone.[14] Cisco Systems Inc. and EMC Corp., the Hopkinton-based data storage giant, said they have formed a coalition dedicated to accelerating the ability of their corporate customers to "increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy, and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures." According to Bloomberg News, the collaboration will intensify the competition for serving corporate data centers with such rivals as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM.[15]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc ( CSCO.O ) and EMC Corp ( EMC.N ) are teaming up to sell a new line of networking gear, computers and storage equipment designed for use with cloud computing, according to sources familiar with their plans. The line of products, dubbed vBlock, position the two companies to better compete against IBM ( IBM.N ) and Hewlett-Packard Co ( HPQ.N ), which sell a broader array of data center equipment than either Cisco or EMC offer on their own.[16] You partner big-to-big." Cisco and EMC will sell pre-configured infrastructure packages designed to make it faster for companies to build out their data centers under a new brand, dubbed Vblock. They are designed for large corporations to buy hundreds of server computers at once. They use virtualization technology from EMC's VMware Inc subsidiary, which enables companies to run multiple "virtual" machines on a single server computer.[9] Cisco and EMC on Tuesday unveiled Vblock Infrastructure packages, containing hardware from Cisco and EMC and virtualization software from the EMC-owned VMware. The configurations will support thousands of virtual machines and the companies are marketing them as ready-made private clouds. That's a significantly different approach than the one taken by vendors such as Platform Computing and Eucalyptus Systems, which have each developed software packages that take a customer's existing equipment, regardless of vendor, and aggregate them into large resource pools.[17] "The coalition is all about accelerating, getting the technology to customers, and that means partnering," Matheson said. "They will be selling hardware and software, and creating a services drag. It will mean accelerated profits and margins for partners." Breen said that customers and partners will continue to procure the products that go into the Vblock Infrastructure Packages as they have always done from the three vendors individually. "There's no intent by EMC to provide the Cisco products or the VMware virtualization piece," he said. "Our customers still have their options for procurement.[18] EMC says the product will manage Vblock Infrastructure Packages that are, according to press statements from the coalition members, "validated platforms of engineered, integrated IT infrastructure from Cisco, EMC and VMware, that deliver a breakthrough total cost of ownership and pervasive virtualization at a scale to meet today's most demanding use cases." Industry watchers say with several management software acquisitions under its belt, EMC is able to provide significant configuration and change management technologies to its customers.[6] The line of products being introduced is called Vblock Infrastructure Packages, which integrate the hardware and software from all three vendors. These Vblocks are fully integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-go packages that combine networking solutions from Cisco; storage, security, and systems management from EMC; and virtualization software from VMware.[14] Vblock Infrastructure Packages are fully integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow infrastructure packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware with end-to-end vendor accountability.[19]

The senior advisor to Cisco honcho John Chambers, was also the co-founder of 3Com whose breakthrough technologies brought the Internet to the desktop. The comments gain significance in the backdrop of the announcement of the formation of Acadia, a three-way collaboration between Cisco, EMS and VMware on Tuesday for the virtual computing environment (VCE), that will develop integrated cloud computing products called Vblock Infrastrucutre Packages including servers, networking, storage and virtualisation software for data centres.[20] The coalition, known as the Virtual Computing Environment, expands on relationships Cisco announced with VMware, EMC (and others) in March when it announced an increased focus on the data centre market. In March, Cisco u nveiled its own blade servers and the Cisco Unified Computing Architecture (UCS) designed to "unite compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation resources into a single energy efficient system." That initiative was greeted with some scepticsm by industry analysts who argued that enterprises were commited to making purchasing decisions based on 'best of breed' rather than omnibus solutions. The completeness of these new offering should go some way to allay those criticisms by making the bundled offerings more attractive to customers than do-it-yourself systems built up by selecting individual components - servers, storage, networking and security - from different vendors.[21] Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a coalition to help enterprise customers build 'private cloud' virtualised data centres by offering a complete data centre package of integrated servers, storage, networking and virtualisation software.[21]

EMC and VMware are dominant players in storage and server virtualization, technology that allows many computers to run together as efficiently as one machine, but can't match IBM and HP in servers or Cisco in networking. Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, said the new coalition will let the three companies offer customers one-stop shopping - a fully-integrated package that they could not offer on their own. "They've taken server, networking, and storage and put them together into a single unit,'' Bowker said.[22]

Computerworld - A certain truth about the big IT vendors is they want to sell as much as possible to any one customer and now, with virtualization, cloud computing and very tight IT budgets, they believe they have an opening. There are effectively four enterprise vendors today: IBM, HP, Oracle-Sun Microsystems (which are due to merge), and now arguably Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware, which this week announced plans to jointly offer what they called a "Virtual Computing Environment" that will be supported through a joint venture called Acadia.[23] In unveiling the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating customer build-outs of private cloud infrastructures through an end-to-end enablement of service providers and large enterprise customers. Acadia's unique "build, operate, transfer" model for delivering the Vblock architecture, addressing people, process and technology, will offer customers further choice, flexibility and cost advantages as they seek to virtualize their IT infrastructures and evolve to private cloud environments.[19] The Virtual Computing Environment coalition today also introduced Acadia -- a Cisco and EMC solutions joint venture to build, operate, and transfer Vblock infrastructure to organizations that want to accelerate their journey to pervasive virtualization and private cloud computing while reducing their operating expenses.[19]

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and EMC, together with VMware will discuss the new Virtual Computing Environment Coalition and how it will help organizations simplify and accelerate pervasive virtualization and the transition to private cloud infrastructures.[24] John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco, Joe Tucci, chairman, president and CEO of EMC Corp, and Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware will discuss the new Virtual Computing Environment coalition and how it will help organizations simplify and accelerate pervasive virtualization and the transition to private cloud infrastructures.[19] Joseph Tucci, EMC chairman and CEO, said, "Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, are coming together in an unprecedented way to help our customers. They need to be able to shift more of their IT budgets to the development and rapid implementation of new technologies that help their organizations create differentiated business advantages. Many of them understand the vast potential of the private cloud. With shared roadmaps and a long-term commitment, the Virtual Computing Environment coalition will bring true accountability, along with the best-of-breed technologies our respective customers have come to expect, to help enable their success." "Customers are increasingly looking to virtualization to dramatically improve the performance and flexibility of their existing IT systems," said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware.[19]

SAN FRANCISCO — Technology titans Cisco, EMC and VMware on Tuesday announced an alliance to peddle the wonders of cloud computing and virtualization in a 350-billion-dollar business market. The U.S. firms said they have formed a Virtual Computing Environment coalition to entice firms with ways to make computer networks more flexible while also cutting operating costs.[25] Cisco and EMC, and subsidiary VMware, this week revealed their plans to advance data center technologies via the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, which could have EMC ultimately providing management software to span heterogeneous virtual and cloud computing environments.[6] The three firms are creating something called the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, "to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real-estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures." Or in other words, they are teaming up to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon, in hopes of selling more products and services to IT managers.[26] Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion(1) annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates, with half of that spent on capital expenses (products) and half on operating expenses (services and labor). An estimated 70 percent(2) or more of those costs are expended to maintain existing infrastructures, leaving 30 percent or less for new technology initiatives and applications that can provide breakthrough differentiation for businesses. It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion(3), or 20% of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015. The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses.[19]

Private computing clouds and virtual computing environments are becoming very important to customers and are a part of any discussion about building a new data center or expanding an old one, Jones said. "Vblock will provide a lot more definition around virtual computing environments," he said. The coalition comes at a fascinating time in the market as customers seriously look at how to integrate networks, storage and servers as a single solution, said Richard Zimmermann, vice president of the Network Solutions Group at Forsythe, a Skokie, Ill. -based solution provider and partner to the three vendors.[4] "We have been pleased to contribute industry leading data center building blocks to server and storage solutions from EMC and Cisco. We look forward to extending these relationships by supporting their Virtual Computing Environment coalition in a similar fashion," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and General Manager of Intel's Data Center Group.[19] Cisco announced another major initiative today, called the Virtual Computing Environment coalition. It's designed to make it a power in the data center and the emerging world of cloud computing.[12]

EMC and Cisco will offer systems that would allow customers to install new software or manage company information from a single control center. Tucci said VBlock would transform the company's data center into a "private cloud,'' similar to the cloud computing services found on the Internet, where users run software that is stored online instead of on their own desktops.[22] "We were expecting growth to come from our existing customers, but we're already seeing some new customers coming on aboard because of the focus we have on the VMware, Cisco and EMC," Descoeudres said. NetStar will also offer its nSVisage software-as-a-service monitoring application as part of the new service. Interest in both public and private cloud computing has created a flurry of activity in the data centre industry.[27]

King said, VCE's unified sales, service and support strategy offers clients the same benefits as a single vendor's "one throat to choke" services and support. As King sees it, VCE will run into competition from established system vendors and their allies. If VCE even nominally succeeds as designed, Cisco, EMC and VMware all stand to profit, as will Intel, both from the coalition's leverage of its Xeon server technologies and VCE's focus on industry-standard business computing. He said, the coalition is not absolutely critical to any of the participants' long-term success. Whether enterprises significantly move toward VCE-enabled private cloud computing, he added, Cisco, EMC and VMware will remain leaders in their respective markets and areas of expertise. "In essence, by leveraging their unique talents and technologies along with a common vision, the coalition should allow Cisco, EMC and VMware to explore and enable the future of enterprise computing while remaining firmly rooted in the here and now," King said. "That qualifies as a win-win for VCE's partners and cloud-bound enterprise customers."[28]

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Jargon abounds as Cisco, EMC and VMware partner up to sell "end-to-end" and "best-of-breed" IT infrastructure into the $350 billion data center infrastructure market. "Or in other words," explains Barron's Eric Savitz, "they are teaming up to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon, in hopes of selling more products and services to IT managers."[29] The products will be sold directly to data centers. Or, for those who would rather just get it cloud-style, with a bill based on utilization and have someone else actually run it, EMC and Cisco are setting up a joint venture to peddle vBlock on an infrastructure as a service cloud. Of course, EMC already sells its Atmos cloud services, and it is unclear what will happen to these products.[11] Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO), EMC Corp. (EMC) and VMware Inc. (VMW) unveiled a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product, part of a broader trend by technology companies to provide a broad range of products.[30] Cisco used the event to unveil a joint venture with EMC ( EMC ) and a lineup of data center products in conjunction with EMC and VMware ( VMW ). Together, the companies will sell what they're billing as the building blocks of data centers, massive storehouses of computing power.[31]

Noting that the Cisco-EMC joint venture will essentially package EMC storage gear, VMware management tools and Cisco networking and computing products with dedicated services, the Cisco CEO John Chambers informed the Financial Times that the tie-up would probably be the most strategically-significant technology merger over a decade. Chambers added: "This is about changing the industry.[13] The joint venture, to be called Acadia, will combine EMC storage equipment, VMware management tools and Cisco networking and computing products with dedicated services.[32]

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware this morning announced the formation of a new joint venture called Acadia and a stack of data centre servers, storage, networking.[3] In a direct challenge to computer giants IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., data storage firm EMC Corp. of Hopkinton has allied with Cisco Systems Inc., the world's leading computer networking company. In a joint venture, EMC, its majority-owned subsidiary VMware Inc., and Cisco will sell prefabricated business computer systems.[22]

The big virtualization news this week was the partnership announcement from three industry-leading companies: Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware.'' The three were already intimately connected to each other through ownership -- EMC owns nearly 85 percent of VMware, and Cisco owns a small percentage stake in the virtualization company too'' But now, this union appears to be even stronger with a joint venture announced around a new integrated datacenter coalition called the Virtual Computing Environment.[14] The partnership, which also includes virtualization software vendor VMware, is set up in two parts: one is a Virtual Computing Environment coalition to develop the new products; the other is a joint venture, called Acadia, to train customers and partners on how to install and use the products.[33] The new Virtual Computing Environment coalition (VCE) has four major components: preconfigured product bundles called Vblocks; a joint support and direct sales model; a new joint channel partner program; and a new joint venture services company, Acadia.[34]

The Acadia joint venture and Virtual Computing Environment coalition will push all-in-one packages of products from all three companies, with the intention of making it easy to install a high-quality virtual computing environment in your data center.[35]

The coterie is calling itself the "Virtual Computing Environment coalition," and the two parent companies are launching a separate joint venture called "Acadia." Given rumors of a possible Cisco purchase of EMC, Reuters' Jim Finkle has his own interpretation : With the news, Cisco and EMC "dampened speculation the two companies would merge," writes Finkle. He notes top executives from both companies saying the speculation was off-base.[29]

Acadia was announced along with a parallel organization, dubbed the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, which is also being led by Cisco, EMC and VMware (the virtualization software specialist that EMC purchased but operates as a publicly traded company).[36] Called the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, the announcement was called "unprecedented," something destined to lead to "greater IT infrastructure flexibility." What the Cisco, EMC and, ahem, VMware collaboration -- EMC owns VMware -- represents is an opportunity for Cisco to sell its Unified Computing System (UCS) server and networking platform into EMC's customer install base.[37]

Cloud-computing refers to hosted computing services that customers access over the Internet. Analysts forecast that such services will grow far faster than an otherwise sluggish technology market over the coming years. Cisco is providing the networking gear and server computers to the vBlock line, while EMC is contributing storage equipment and virtualization technology from its VMware Inc ( VMW.N ) software subsidiary, according to the sources, who were not authorized to discuss the project in public before a formal announcement next week.[16] In addition to Cisco and EMC as the lead investors, the build-out of Acadia's expanded capabilities in 2010 has also been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel. Because the Vblock architecture relies heavily on Intel Xeon processors and other Intel data center technology, Intel will join the Acadia effort as a minority investor to facilitate and accelerate customer adoption of the latest Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.[19] El Reg badgered Gary Thome, chief strategist and architect for the BladeSystem line at HP, about bringing HP's rack servers and larger SMP systems into the Matrix fold, as well as extending the VirtualConnect I/O virtualization that has been a key reason why companies have deployed HP blades, to rack and big iron boxes. Thus far, HP is mum on whatever prospects this might hold. Not every customer wants blade servers - they might have more peripheral expansion and local storage needs than blades can deliver - so Matrix most definitely should not be restricted to blades. It is interesting to note, of course, that the Vblock virtualized data center pods that Cisco and EMC launched yesterday come in both blade and rack versions, using converged server and storage network fabrics.[38]

The idea is also to have third party application providers, system integrators, and channel partners of the respective companies get a piece of the action. That is sure to prick up the ears of the server and storage channels that have been slammed by the economic downturn. The feeds and speeds of these Vblock infrastructure packages were not divulged at press time, but the partners say that early customer trials have shown a 40 per cent reduction in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data centres. These numbers are consistent with the claims that VMware has made separately about its vSphere 4.0 server virtualization stack and that Cisco has been making with the California boxes.[3] Acadia expects to begin customer operations in the first calendar quarter of calendar year 2010. Founded on a Vblock architecture that incorporates Cisco, EMC and VMware technologies, Acadia will train and help customers and an ecosystem of service providers and other partners to build, operate and transfer Vblock Infrastructure Packages to customers or their partner of choice.[19] The goal of Acadia, which will be set up as a separate legal entity, is to ensure the Vblock Infrastructure Packages are built in a standardized and repeatable fashion for customer data centers, Peres said. He said, Acadia is not a way for customers to outsource their virtual data centers or private cloud computing services, but instead works with partners and customers to help operate virtual data centers.[18] Joe Tucci, EMC's chief executive officer, said that Acadia's main mission will be to accelerate cloud and virtualisation product sales and deployment, as well as get initial operations rolling, and then transfer operations to customers or partners. "It will be a repository of knowledge transfer and best practices", he said, adding that most cloud computing services are viewed as weak in areas such as security and that the coalition seeks to assist organisations in this regard, by allowing them to transition their data centres into the virtual world. The creation of the cloud computing oalition have been rumoured for several months, but the three companies said that VCE has been in gestation for almost a year now, and is being announced, now that all three firms are ready to offer their services to companies of all sizes.[39] Capitalized by VMware and Intel, the companies said Acadia's model for delivering Vblock solutions will offer choice, flexibility and cost advantages. VCE exists to drive sales of the members' various technologies and to make real their vision of private cloud computing, but the most significant part of the announcement is the coalition itself, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. While the IT industry as a whole loves the notion of collaboration, he said, the shape of most such relationships is conventional in the extreme, focusing on simple product interoperability and customer issues.[28]

Virtual Computing Environment coalition professional services, jointly developed and delivered, will help customers to understand how to maximize value and speed time to solution. These offers include: the Cloud-based Business Advisory Service, Private Cloud Strategic Impact Advisory Service, Private Cloud Architecture Impact Advisory Service, Virtual Desktop Advisory Service, Cloud Computing Strategy Service, and Vblock Design and Implementation Service.[19] With the introduction of Vblock Infrastructure Packages, the Virtual Computing Environment coalition will provide customers with a fundamentally better approach to streamlining and optimizing IT strategies around private clouds.[19]

Cisco's computing coalition will focus on providing businesses "private cloud infrastructures" that address concerns about protecting and controlling data. The alliance rolled out its first offering, a VBlock package for private clouds, virtual computing environments controlled and operated for individual firms or organizations.[25]

Cisco, EMC - the parent company to RSA Security - and VMware have formed the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a collaboration designed to boost the adoption of virtualisation in the cloud.[39] In a move to push cloud computing into the mainstream, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware launched the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition on Tuesday.[28] The Virtual Computing Environment is a way for Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware to present a single face for clients moving to cloud computing.[28]

Cisco isn't going to that extreme here. It is forming a cloud computing partnership with storage expert EMC and its virtual computing underling, VMware.[35]

If you can't go it alone, partner up with someone to get it done. It also helps Cisco kick things into high gear with moving the company into the computer server market. Cisco launched its first line of servers earlier this year and is looking to gain some traction. The venture may also help EMC and VMware get traction of its own by further extending its footprint into the cloud computing market -- one it has been loudly trying to establish for the last two years.[14]

This combination of products and services is competitive to the offerings that IBM and HP bring to the table. It likely will lead where networking and information management is critical, given that this is where the partners individually have market leading positions, and lag where server hardware breadth is critical, since HP and IBM have vastly stronger server blade offerings. On services, an integrated effort will be critical to making this all work and EMC, whose focus on customer satisfaction I've written about, is playing the role of general contractor. This is a solid effort to step up to this new opportunity but its success will depend on either getting a partner that is stronger on servers or Cisco rapidly ramping its own server efforts to be more competitive to IBM and HP. The latter, given IBM and HP'''s scale, will be difficult. Given Cisco'''s size and resources and the special nature of this market, it's not impossible. This does represent a major attempt to balance HP and IBM and create a third major competitor for the private cloud market.[40] Platform's ISF software, for example, aggregates servers, storage, networking tools and hypervisors to create a shared pool of physical and virtual resources. Those pools could potentially include the Vblock Infrastructure packages developed by Cisco and EMC, says Martin Harris, director of product management for Platform. Within a Platform ISF cloud, the Cisco/EMC packages would become just another set of hardware and software that can be provisioned to applications as needed, he says.[17] The new products will be built with computer servers from Cisco, data storage hardware and software from EMC, and server management software from VMware.[22]

"Purdue is a research university and the majority of our IT needs are spent on high-performance computing, which requires strong computing, massive amounts of storage, and high-speed networking fabric," said Steven Tally, CTO of Purdue University. "The Vblock solution offers these elements in a single pre-tested, pre-integrated solution which will be easier to deploy. VMware, Cisco, and EMC are ideal partners to respond to this problem because they offer complementary tool sets and have a history of delivering good products in the market space. When these solutions are tied together in a coherent and systematic way, it is very good news for an environment like Purdue."[19] Vblock 1 and Vblock 2 are shipping now, and Vblock 0 will ship in a few weeks. Vblock 2 supports between 3,000 and more than 6,000 virtual machines, and consists of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers, its Nexus 1000V software switch and MDS storage switches, EMC's Symmetrix V-Max storage with RSA security software, and VMware vSphere. EMC vice president of global solutions Todd Pavone said the price of this configuration will be approximately $6 million.[34] Vblock 0 is an entry level configuration that will not ship until 2010 but will support between 300 and 800 virtual machines running atop ESX Server 4.0, VMware's latest hypervisor and the core of the vSphere 4.0 stack. This stack is aimed at mid-sized businesses looking to deploy a private ESX Server cloud, or for test and development departments where VMware is extremely popular. This setup includes California blades and the Nexus 1000V virtual switch from Cisco, EMC's Unified Storage (which has security provided by EMC's RSA unit), and uses vSphere to virtualize the stack.[3]

Vblock 2 is aimed at larger customers, and spans from 3,000 to 6,000 virtual machines, and switches out the Clariion arrays for larger Symmetrix V-Max arrays. Cisco, EMC, and VMware are also planning to tailor Vblocks for specific vertical applications and to target specific opportunities, such as streaming applications and virtual desktops from the data centre down to end user client machines. The three companies did not say precisely when the Vblock 1 and Vblock 2 configurations will start shipping, other than sometime in this quarter. They also did not elaborate on how partners of any of the three companies would be certified to sell Vblocks in conjunction with Acadia, but did say that authorized systems integrators and channel partners would be in on the action.[3]

While Vblock has no secret ingredients, it is convenient for the channel, Zimmermann said. "The convenience is in the preconfiguration and predesigning," he said. "We can do the same things individually, but this has the blessing of the manufacturers." Zimmermann said, he likes the idea of the consolidated technical and sales support promised by the new Acadia joint venture. Forsythe, which also partners with Cisco and EMC competitors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, is evaluating which customers are best suited for the Vblock Infrastructure Packages, Zimmermann said.[4] The Vblock Infrastructure Packages, along with Acadia, a joint venture that Cisco and EMC plan to form next year to bring the solutions to market, are aimed squarely at helping ensure channel partners are the primary go-to-market focus for the coalition, the vendors' channel chiefs said.[4] Next year will also see the debut of Acadia, a Cisco-EMC joint venture with investment from VMware and Intel, which will help the vendors work with large customers and channel partners to build, operate and then transfer Vblock infrastructures, said Edison Peres, senior vice president of worldwide channels at Cisco.[18]

Cisco and EMC have also formed a joint venture company, Acadia Solutions, with minority shareholdings from VMware and Intel that will help customers finance and deploy data centres under build-operate-transfer models.[21] Cisco, EMC and VMware have, as expected, announced a new joint venture to deliver large-scale virtualised cloud infrastructure to the data centre.[41]

Looks to add new tools to data centre practice. The alliance between VMware, EMC and Cisco is proving fruitful for network services company NetStar Australia, which is lining up to deliver the alliance's newly-announced Vblock infrastructure packages into Australia through its new data centre consulting division. NetStar's marketing director Oliver Descoeudres described the Vblock strategy as fitting well with his company's new division, which provides data centres lifecycle consulting and managed services.[27] The kind of solutions being offered with the Vblock Infrastructure Packages are similar to the solutions channel partners like Forsythe are already building with the three vendors, Zimmermann said. "We take these products and use them to add value every day," he said. "Cisco, EMC and VMware are trying to do the same thing by integrating them as building blocks.[4] Currently, there is no specific distributor program for the Vblock Infrastructure Packages, Peres said. Solution providers will continue to purchase the products related to the Vblock configurations from their existing Cisco, EMC and VMware distributors, he said.[18]

To help ensure solutions are de-risked and highly secure, Vblocks will be ISO 27001 compliant. Vblock Infrastructure Packages are scheduled to be available this quarter direct from authorized systems integrators and channel partners. EMC, Cisco and VMware components can be purchased directly from the respective companies or their authorized partners.[19]

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are validated platforms of engineered, integrated IT infrastructure from Cisco, EMC and VMware, that deliver a breakthrough total cost of ownership and pervasive virtualization at a scale to meet today's most demanding use cases.[19]

Some analysts say the collaboration between Cisco, EMC and VMware could further strain relations and partnerships each company has with other major vendors in the data center market -- notably, IBM, HP and Dell. "They're putting themselves in direct competition" with those powers, says Deni Connor, principal of Storage Strategies NOW. "And this may jeopardize VMware's relationship with its server and operating system partners," which include IBM, HP, Dell, CA, NetApp and Sun Microsystems. Connor sees the division widening between these camps as they all compete for the lion's share of data center expenditures. VMware CEO Paul Maritz downplayed the impact to his company's relationships during the Webcast. "We remain in our commitments," he said.[42] The Cisco Subnet at Network World sees storms ahead. "The danger''is that VMware may have wounded its relationships with HP, IBM and several other partners. Cisco already did that earlier this year when it rolled out UCS. If anything, the coalition has created even more division between data center compute, storage, networking and now virtualization vendors. Tensions mount with each partnership as groups of vendors''mill around nervously, trash talking and brandishing their hardware and software."[43]

As El Reg reported earlier Tuesday, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware announced a partnership to peddle integrated server, storage, and networking stacks to data centers that want to buy preconfigured and integrated x64 servers running VMware's vSphere 4.0 software.[2] Cisco Systems laid another plank in its efforts to become a single stop shop for data center clients this week by forming a broad partnership with storage giant EMC. Under the terms of the partnership the two companies will form a joint venture called Acadia that will sell their combined offerings to data center clients. The announcement laid to rest rumors that the companies may in fact merge after working together for several years to bundle their offerings. In a press conference Tuesday, the heads of both companies said such speculation was unfounded.[44] Cisco and EMC also announced a joint venture with Intel Corp called Acadia that will offer to help build and run some data center systems for companies. As they announced that partnership on Tuesday, top executives from both companies suggested that persistent speculation that Cisco plans to acquire EMC was unfounded.[9]

Like the rest of the IT industry, Hewlett-Packard was apparently expecting Cisco Systems and EMC to announce their Acadia joint venture and Vblock virtualized data center infrastructure on Wednesday.[38] EMC and Cisco also announced a joint venture called Acadia, which will build and manage VBlock data centers. Acadia workers would oversee the installation of VBlock systems and train employees to operate them.[22]

One part of the partnership calls for the two companies to form a joint venture that will sell vBlock as a hosted service. Customers can pay for that service based on the amount of computing power and storage that they need, accessing it via the Internet. That joint venture will assemble computer systems for customers, integrating all necessary hardware and software to make the systems work. "It's a 'virtual block' of the data center. You can buy it from them as a service, then eventually transition it to your own data center," said one of the people familiar with the plan.[16]

No need for separate servers to do partitioning, encryption, networking, email -- and so on -- anymore. It's all very politically, environmentally, and fiscally correct. Cisco introduced its Unified Computing System back on March 16, 2009. It consists of a new data center architecture, a new Cisco-designed server and a new set of management software and services based on Intel's powerful quad-core Nehalem Xeon processors. HP's "converged" system is built of its own C-class blade servers, StorageWorks arrays, and its own in-house networking and data management software.[45] Analysis: Cisco and HP are coming at the next-generation data center with opposite strategies: Cisco wants to partner with the best available suppliers, and HP wants to be the one-stop shop for any enterprise. The general direction of all of this: Cloud computing, and who will become the "go-to" suppliers of new systems to run Internet-delivered services as older data centers get replaced during the next several years.[45] The companies also say that approximately $85 billion can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015. "When we look back on this in five years from now, we'll see that this was the most major change in data centers and cloud computing made in this decade," said Cisco CEO John Chambers on the coalition's potential impact.[42] For an announcement that's supposed to be all about openness, CEO's John Chambers, Joe Tucci and Paul Maritz looked a bit lonely up there, from my perspective. Just last March, Chambers attracted a who's who of luminaries to help Cisco launch the first part of its data center assault: it's entry into the server market back in March. On hand for that event were top execs froom Microsoft, Intel, Accenture and BMC, and the press release listed companies such as Oracle, Red Hat and NetApp as partners as well. The backdrop behind this smallish coalition is not about more industry cooperation, but more division. It's another sign that the battle lines are being solidified in the epic battle for cloud computing relevance.[12]

Andre Smit, Cisco's Asia Pacific Managing Director for Data Center Sales said that Acadia is "at a very early stage," and added that "we do not see Acadia in Australia for the foreseeable future." The four companies will continue to engage with customers in much the same way they have done when selling Cisco's Unified Computing systems, but with extra integration so that customers can enjoy a vBlock experience.[41] Cisco and HP are earning most of the data center headlines lately. Both companies have come out in 2009 with new-generation data center innards that combine computing power, networking, storage, and data security and management into ever-shrinking physical hardware. This is supposed to add much more functionality into far fewer boxes, resulting in less power drawn from the wall, fewer square feet to buy and cool, and less staff time needed to handle it all.[45] The HP strategy includes hardware, software and services to create an infrastructure that brings together computing, storage, networking and management resources into a single pool designed to help increase businesses' agility and efficiency and drive down operation and maintenance costs in the data center.[45] HP believes that the best way for enterprises to strip costs out of the environments and free up IT dollars for other uses is to integrate, standardize and virtualize as much as possible. They couple that capability with business intelligence and warehousing systems built on its Neoview system that runs on its Integrity BladeSystems, as well as improve cross platform integration with its Unix systems. It has virtualized I/0 and storage, and can manage environmental systems through its smart grid technology that can tune infrastructure demands, power and cooling, to application loads. Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif., said that "there seems to be a move afoot to enable enterprises and service providers to exert the kind of highly integrated and optimize management of their data centers that in the old days that were able to exert across a mainframe system." HP CEO Mark Hurd told users at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo last month that he didn't want to compete with other vendors on point solutions, but instead wanted to provide the entire stack.[23]

The concept of the Vblock Infrastructure Packages is helping better explain what the three vendors are doing to help advance the idea of a virtual data center, said Ian Jones, vice president of IT solutions at Coleman Technologies, an Orlando, Fla. -based solution provider that partners with all three vendors.[4] Vblock 0 will be an entry-level configuration available in 2010, supporting 300 up to 800 virtual machines, for the first time bringing the benefits of private clouds within reach of medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations, and for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs, and customers.[19]

Cisco and EMC also introduced Acadia, a joint venture focused on accelerating build-outs of private cloud infrastructures by service providers and large enterprise customers.[28] Cisco and EMC this week unveiled their anticipated collaboration, which will provide integrated products and services for customers building private cloud computing infrastructures.[33] Cisco, EMC and VMware have worked closely over the past year on a shared vision for the future of enterprise IT infrastructure -- private cloud computing.[19]

Following the official announcement of the long-awaited cloud alliance between EMC Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and VMware Tuesday, enterprise data storage industry experts and customers said they are wary of the trend toward vendor consolidation and the delivery of vertically integrated stacks.[34] EMC partner Dell Inc. also criticized the VCE approach. "The VMware, Cisco and EMC joint venture assumes that customers are looking for closed technology architectures that lock them into a restricted vendor stack," Praveen Asthana, VP, enterprise storage and networking said in a statement.[34]

On a webcast to announce VCE, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, Cisco CEO John Chambers and VMware CEO Paul Maritz insisted that the new alliance was driven by customers looking for simpler deployments, and that it does not mean a reduction in users' choices. "View this as if you're in a restaurant and there are two sides to the menu," Tucci said. "One is pre-fixed, where we've chosen the meal and the wines. all three companies will also be offering the other side of the menu, which is the a la carte, where you can take VMware and partner with another server or storage company." According to Chambers, "to say this is customer-driven would be an understatement." He said customers are clamoring for the three companies to work better together.[34] The companies plan to promote something called Vblock, an offering that combines EMC's storage equipment, Cisco servers and networking gear and VMware software.[36] Known as "Vblocks," the products include networking equipment from Cisco, computer storage gear from EMC, and VMware virtualization software, which is designed to boost the efficiency of servers, the computers that run Web sites and corporate networks.[31] The alliance could be a major boost to Cisco's effort to expand beyond the networking equipment business. Earlier this year, Cisco launched the Unified Computing System, a new line of server computers. This put Cisco in competition against industry titans IBM and HP, which sell integrated computers and storage products.[22] VCE plans further reference architectures for backup, but for now backing up Vblocks will be up to the customer and service providers. This alliance follows a trend this year of consolidation and vertical integration among large IT vendors with the goal of offering preconfigured stacks to customers for rapid deployment. Cisco competitor Brocade Communications Systems Inc. is forming its own alliances with server and application vendors put off by Cisco's rollout of its own servers, including Dell Inc. and Oracle Corp. Oracle itself is offering its Exadata vertically integrated appliances based on the hardware it is acquiring from Sun Microsystems. IBM Corp. also recently announced new vertically integrated products.[34]

Dell is not, let's say, a true enterprise-class competitor to the others. It's smaller than EVC, HP and IBM, doesn't have its own big iron, server or storage, and it is still building up a top-level services capability. Sunacle is also limited in scope as it's going to be focussed on Oracle applications and is currently going through a Sun transplant surgery and recovery process that could take years. That leaves HP and IBM. IBM lacks an in-house networking box capability and, so far, has shown public reluctance to building its own integrated IT stack offering and naming it, like Cisco's UCS California concept, or HP's Blade Matrix. Of all these EVC competitors, HP is the closest with its own branded integrated data centre stack offering, BladeSystem Matrix (BSM), built from in-house pieces, although using VMware.[46] We reckon V-Blocks will be able to communicate with each other and interoperate, with policies setting processing needs, network type and bandwidth, and storage quality of service, which would detail capacity, media type, protection method and so forth. Nobody else, no EVC (EMC, VMware, Cisco) competitor, has this, or do they? The present competitors are Dell, HP, IBM and Sunacle (Sun + Oracle). Players that could join this integrated and virtualised data centre IT stack party are Hitachi and Fujitsu. They have the physical pieces but not the virtualisation software. For that they must be looking at Citrix, RedHat and Microsoft, with the latter being the main hope.[46]

The joint services are being offered is `Vblocks' that bundle VMware's software with Cisco's virtualised server hardware and EMC's data storage technology.[39]

Going by the latest reports, the current week may witness the materialization of a long-rumored tie-up between Cisco systems and EMC. The alliance - between the networking biggie and server aspirant Cisco Systems and the storage powerhouse and VMware owner EMC - will result in bringing forth bundled computing gear and services.[13] EMC, Cisco alliance takes on computing giants IBM, HP Boston Globe In a direct challenge to computer giants IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., data storage firm EMC Corp. of Hopkinton has allied with Cisco Systems Inc., the world's leading computer networking company.[22] Rumours are bristling about the collaboration between Cisco Systems Inc. and EMC Corp. over selling new range of networking gear, including computers as well as storage equipment tailored for use in the cloud computing domain.[8]

Cisco Systems (CSCO), EMC (EMC) and VMware (VMW) are teaming up to sell hardware and software for cloud computing, the companies announced today.[26] "So you have to form coalitions." Cisco, EMC, and VMware know the VUE coalition cannot be the only way to buy the hardware and software that the companies peddle for profit, and they have no intention of only selling their products collectively through a quasi-united sales effort. Tucci said all three companies would continue to sell their menu of products, but the Vblock offerings were akin to a prix fixe menu without any substitutions. This is the definition of openness that these three companies are using.[2] "So rather than just being words, we are now starting to see actual designs that incorporate the three product sets. "We are very keen to work with Cisco, EMC and VMware to see what role NetStar can play working with Vblock to bring those solutions to market. Cisco is very much encouraging us to move into this space, as they see it as a natural progression for Cisco Gold partners." NetStar made its first hire for the new business in July, and Descoeudres said it will exceed its projected full year revenue within its first five months.[27]

Think of vBlock as the plug and play data-center solution, it will consist of Cisco UCS/Nexus/MDS, EMC Storage and VMware Virtualization all within a pre-designed and built rack solution - simply drop it in your data-center, plug it in and deploy virtual machines. This is not really any different than purchasing HP Servers, NetApp Storage and VMware licenses separately.[47] StorageIO analyst Greg Schulz said it will be important to keep an eye on how Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. and Microsoft react. "A majority of all guests in virtual machines are Windows-based - surely if their approach is going in to where VMware has had success, shouldn't Microsoft be invited into the ecosystem?" he said. HP has already been alienated by Cisco's UCS. But "I don't see HP and VMware running away from each other - they both need each other," Schulz said. Lee Johns, HP's marketing director for unified storage, said HP will remain agnostic when it comes to supporting VMware and Hyper-V. However, he was critical of the VCE concept. "It remains to be seen how a coalition that will the strain relationships of those vendors with other vendors is going to progress," he said. "If you look at where Cisco and EMC are in the server business, it's not very far.[34]

A V-Block is, El Reg reckons, a virtual block of IT gear. It is a basic set of server, storage and switch resources described as a metadata set and capable of being provisioned, operated, managed and de-provisioned by a data centre operating system, a vSphere. Cisco and EMC bring the server, storage and network building blocks, and VMware brings the virtual glue to bind them together into a usable virtual machine inside a virtualised data centre.[46]

Citing sources familiar with Cisco's and EMC's plans, vBlock will consist of Cisco's networking and servers, EMC storage, and VMware server and network virtualization.[11] Acadia will provide a package of EMC storage gear, VMware management applications and Cisco networking and computing products.[48] The products being developed by the coalition are called Vblock Infrastructure Packages. They are pre-integrated, tested and validated packages combining virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management products from the three vendors.[42] The vision includes Vblock Infrastructure Packages that work to integrate virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies backed by end-to-end vendor accountability.[28]

Tom Bittman, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said the VCE Vblock Infrastructure Package may resemble cloud, and it provides the underlying infrastructure for cloud computing, but it lacks higher-level management software that would seamlessly and automatically provision capacity for applications without manual intervention. "Actually, I'm surprised BMC, a close partner of Cisco's, was not a part of this," Bittman said.[37] Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, stressed that partners will make most of the money from the Vblock Infrastructure Packages. "Think of these as the onramps for service providers, in ways that allow our partners to focus on the application side or the solution side or building the clouds themselves. They make this much more open an architecture.[5] Vblock Infrastructure Packages can be extended by complementary systems integrators, service providers, channel partners, and ISVs.[19]

Acadia has already committed to create "an ecosystem of service providers and other partners to build, operate and transfer Vblock Infrastructure" in a press release announcing the new initiatives.[41]

"Infrastructure I can trust -- a brand I can trust -- that's what I see as the difference here," Wolf said. The Storage Networking Industry Association of Australia and New Zealand (SNIA ANZ) has also commented on the new initiatives, stating that "SNIA ANZ observes that users of virtualisation technology have quickly found it to be powerful, but as they have adopted it more widely they have also found that it brings new and sometimes unforseen complexities." "The Acadia announcement is clearly aimed at helping virtualisation users to address and overcome those complexities and start to extend virtualisation into internal or federated cloud computing systems." "As such, SNIA ANZ welcomes the new company to the market, as the collaboration potentially makes it simpler for organisations to deploy an enterprise cloud infrastructure. Alongside Virtualisation, advancements in storage technologies, such as solid state storage and object based storage are driving the adoption of cloud services and we see more storage related technology advancements on the horizon."[41] I wnder sometimes about the level of knowledge people who proclaim to be industry analysts have - to say "Or in other words, they are teaming up to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon, in hopes of selling more products and services to IT managers." - you must be kidding - VMware has a product that is the platform for cloud computing and the other two players integrate tightly with an indication from this that they are about to integrate more tightly. It seems to me that the aim of this collaboration is to provide specialised capability to implement cloud services for companies in their data centre and extend this to the Internet. If cloud computing/true utility computing does come to pass - the real question is - how will this affect companies such as Microsoft that really have been caught napping for the past 3 - 5 years and their stranglehold of influence over the Information Technology space.[26] The companies hope to become a primary infrastructure provider to the booming data center market as well as offer products to the emerging cloud computing market.[44] The general direction of all of this: Cloud computing, and who will become the "go-to" suppliers of new systems to run Internet-delivered services as older data centers get replaced during the next several years.[45] Research firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion a year, with half of that spent on capital expenses (products) and half on operating expenses. It is also estimated that the market for virtualization and private cloud technology could reach $85 billion by 2015.[44] The coalition has been created to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.[19]

"Today's announcement addresses our customers' greatest challenges and opportunities in the data center," said John Chambers, CEO of Cisco. "This coalition is about more than technology and partnership. It is about an entirely new and unique approach to the data center that improves utilization, power consumption and security of information, all in a way that lowers the total cost to the customer, not via a box, but with a network-based architectural approach for optimizing virtual resources."[19]

Later today, I read in the NY Times that Cisco and EMC have formed a joint venture to pursue the data center market for large business (see text below). This afternoon, I attended a Telecom Council session where Cisco Sr VP Kelly Ahuja talked about the explosive growth the company expects from the mobile Internet. Their big play in this area has to be the acquisition of Starent Networks for $3B- a prominent wireless packet core vendor.[10] It seems like you can'''t blink these days without a tech-equipment maker getting into the services business. The latest to do so are Cisco Systems and EMC, which said Tuesday that they will launch a joint venture to build and install data-center products from the companies.[36] By forging a joint venture with EMC and building products with VMware, Cisco Systems ( CSCO ) hopes to reap many of the benefits of an acquisition of one or both--without incurring the much higher costs and risks. Cisco CEO John Chambers indicated as much during a Nov. 3 press conference heralding the deal, when he lamented the frequent failure of tech-industry tieups. About 90% of these acquisitions don't succeed, and even more partnerships founder, Chambers said.[31]

The joint venture Acadia, which will be made available to the channel in early 2010, will see Cisco and EMC build, operate and then transfer VBlock solutions customers themselves or to the channel partners on behalf of the customer.[1] The''announcement of the'' Virtual Computing Environment ''and Acadia joint venture involving''Cisco, VMware and EMC has triggered much discussion among analysts and bloggers, particularly about the competitive landscape and''impact of the alliance on partner ecosystems.[43] Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and EMC, together with VMware, today introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders.[19]

VMware, Cisco and EMC created a new marketing ploy called VCE (Virtual Compute Environment), this will provide technical innovations as well as integrated pre-sales services and support.[47] Comment EMC and Cisco have announced a plan to sell virtual blocks - or V-Blocks - likely to be integrated stacks of virtualised servers, storage and switches, either as products or services.[46] The Dow Jones newswire is reporting that people familiar with the plan say that the vBlock products are a combination of Cisco's "California" Unified Computing System blade servers, which sport an integrated vSphere 4.0 stack and a virtual switch from Cisco called the Nexus 1000V as well as physical switches capable of supporting server Ethernet and storage Fibre Channel protocols over the same switches and wires within a cluster of blades.[11]

Designed for large-scale and 'green field' virtualization, Vblock 2 takes advantage of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS), Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS), EMC's Symmetrix V-Max storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.[19] The announcement pivots around bundling Cisco 's ( CSCO - news - people ) networking equipment along with EMC 's ( EMC - news - people ) storage and VMware 's ( VMW - news - people ) virtualization infrastructure.[29] Cisco is a networking specialist, while EMC is adept at infrastructure and VMware is a pioneering computer virtualization company.[25]

Cisco has long been the dominant supplier of networking equipment like switches and routers for corporate data centers. Earlier this year, the company expanded into the computer server market as well, placing it in direct competition with traditional partners like H.P. and I.B.M.[10] The Wall Street Journal notes that the coalition's "targeted approach will allow the companies to maintain tight relationships with independent consulting companies, which may have been jilted when rival equipment makers bought services providers." Maybe that makes up for Cisco jilting system partners like IBM and HP when it started selling its own servers. If this EMC partnership was in the cards back then, I suppose today's announcement explains why Cisco ventured to step on its reseller partners' toes -- there was another major partnership in the works, and Cisco might feel that this one is a bigger opportunity.[35]

Par Botes, EMC's Chief Technology Officer for the Asia Pacific & Japan region told SearchStorage ANZ that "In the past you could not call Cisco and get routed to EMC. Now you can call any of our companies and get a universal experience." Andrew Dutton, VMware's General Manager for Asia Pacific and Japan said the new arrangement will not change the way VMware does business with its other partners.[41] Striking an alliance with EMC and VMware could help Cisco, one of techdom's most acquisitive companies, grab a larger share of customers' computing budgets without the cost and scrutiny of buying VMware outright. "There's been wild speculation that Cisco would buy EMC or VMware," says Brent Bracelin, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities who has "outperform" ratings on Cisco and EMC. The deal "is a substitute for a formal merger between Cisco and EMC," he says. It "will serve as a foundation for what potentially could have been accomplished through a merger, without a lot of red tape."[31]

VMware, 82% owned by EMC, remains a coveted prize for a number of tech companies. Companies use VMware's software to consolidate the number of computers in their data centers, and to more efficiently match computing power to demand. Wall Street analysts and investment bankers say VMware is expensive relative to its earnings and growth rate, however.[31] EMC's Ionix data center management software can be used to manage Vblocks as a single entity, though Vblocks will also support data center management software from other vendors.[34] EMC is missing some key components required for a complete data center management package.[6]

Early customer trials of Vblock Infrastructure Packages have delivered up to 40 percent reductions in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures.[19] "Basically we are removing risk,'' said EMC chief executive Joe Tucci. "This is all about efficiency, control and choice.'' The integrated systems, called VBlock Infrastructure Packages, will allow customers to buy all the equipment and software they need together, from one seller.[22]

"When it comes to sales, service and support, think of it as best-of-breed integrated technology as if we were a single company," said Shekar Ayyar, VMware's vice president of infrastructure alliances. Even though Acadia will help customers operate their Vblocks, executives insisted that they were not entering the hosting business.[7] The three companies, plus Intel, have also created " "Acadia", a new joint venture company billed as a "technology acceleration scheme" that will offer services to companies purchasing vBlock products. Acadia is expected to open its doors early in 2010 and will initially operate only in the USA.[41] The partnership is being created in two parts: one is a VCE coalition to develop the new products, whilst the other part is a joint venture - Acadia - which will train customers and partners on how to install and use the cloud and virtualisation products. Plans call for Acadia to have a staff of around 120, plus its own CEO, which the companies are now recruiting for.[39] Acadia's main mission will be to accelerate product sales and deployment, perform initial operating and then transfer operations to customers or partners. "It will be a repository of knowledge transfer and best practices," said EMC CEO Joe Tucci, during a Webcast announcing the coalition and joint venture.[42]

Cisco and EMC had already let the cat out of the bag before the big chiefs had a chance to talk to the world about a coalition the companies have established and the Acadia joint venture.[2] Basically, a joint venture would allow the two very different companies to look like one as far as customers are concerned, but one that is backed by the full faith and balance sheets of Cisco and EMC. This appears to be what Alpine is all about, according to the current rumors.[11]

We listened to the companies' head honchos during the official announcement for greater detail and some clarification about what Acadia is - and what it is not. What precisely will be bundled into those Vblock infrastructure bundles. John Chambers, Cisco's chief executive officer controlled the show as he tends to at these things given Cisco's market capitalization dwarfs that of EMC and VMware.[2] Cisco and EMC will form a new company called Acadia to support the new products, and Chambers said the three companies are working on at least a half-dozen additional projects.[31] Analysts said the deal was timed to pre-empt HP's announcement of new datacentre products that combine storage, computing power and virtualisation. Cisco is also following the growing trend of alliances, mergers and acquisition many companies are using in the economic downturn to boost their competitiveness.[32]

Cisco Systems made a significant bid for a bigger slice of the corporate data centre market on Tuesday by joining with data storage firm EMC to offer bundled computing gear and services.[49] Cisco Systems has formed an alliance with EMC to combine computing equipment and services.[32]

Cisco will benefit from EMC's alliance with VMware to boost the networking company's ability to compete with HP, IBM and Dell, which all sell equipment with VMware virtualisation software.[32] Computerworld - Cisco, EMC and VMware today joined forces to sell products as a private cloud offering to enterprises.[37] "We see opportunities for our private cloud initiatives to work in concert with what's been announced by EMC, Cisco and VMware."[17]

Acadia's mission, instead, is to "accelerate customers' journey to the private cloud," said Manjula Talreja, Cisco vice president of business development. Acadia is set to open its doors in the first quarter of 2010, said EMC CEO Joe Tucci and will employ 130 people initially.[7] The alliance believes virtualization and cloud computing could save firms about 85 billion dollars in IT costs by 2015. "(Businesses) need to be able to shift more of their IT budgets to the development and rapid implementation of new technologies that help their organizations create differentiated business advantages," said EMC chief executive Joseph Tucci. "Many of them understand the vast potential of the private cloud."[25] Private cloud computing offers the controls and security of today's data center with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs.[19] They are aimed at helping customers build virtual data centers and private computing clouds.[18]

Virtual Computing Environment seamless support offers customers unmatched technical support and rapid problem resolution for virtualization and private cloud solutions.[19] The Virtual Computing Environment coalition Solution Support Team is a cross-company presales team, fully trained in all elements of Vblock architecture and go-to-market resources to work with customers and partners and to facilitate engagements.[19] The Virtual Computing Environment coalition has committed to unify customer engagement with investments spanning dedicated pre-sales, professional services and single support experience to provide a seamless, end-to-end customer and partner experience.[19]

The Virtual Computing Environment coalition has established a robust set of partners committed to the coalition. This includes representation from the entire partner ecosystem, including systems integrators, value added resellers, service providers, and independent software vendors.[19]

The Virtual Computing Environment coalition today introduced Vblock Infrastructure Packages to accelerate the virtualization of IT infrastructures by minimizing risk, complexity and time to benefit.[19]

For the IT consumer, the VCE partnership represents two things: an opportunity to purchase a tightly integrated, pre-tested -- yet proprietary -- set of extended virtualization technologies, and a single throat to choke for service. The VCE alliance calls its private cloud offering Vblock Infrastructure Packages.[37] Vblock infrastructure packages are comprised of integrated stacks of virtualised servers, storage, and switches, and are suitable for public and private clouds.[27]

SalesForce.com uses multi-tenant software and Google uses parallel programming. On the consumer side, what they see is a service-oriented interface all metered by use. They don't see the implementation. If I have to go to the provider and ask for specific virtual machines and be specific about how it's implemented, that's not cloud." Charles King, the principal analyst with Pund-IT Inc., agreed that while the VCE alliance may sound like a "grand pronouncement," about "unprecedented efforts firmly rooted in precedent and unique solutions," it's nothing of the sort. "While the IT industry as a whole loves the notion of collaboration, including partnerships based on friendly 'co-opetition,' the shape of most such relationships is conventional in the extreme, focusing on simple product interoperability and customer issues," King said. "As such, they do not threaten the vertically-focused product and service integration strategies common among traditional end-to-end systems vendors and which are central to some emerging players." He pointed to Oracle, with its impending acquisition of Sun Microsystems, as one emerging player in the private cloud infrastructure marketplace. [37] Trend Micro will next month take the wraps off an updated version of its Deep Security software that is billed as spanning the physical, virtual and cloud computing environments. A panel of experts - assembled in London on Tuesday by Check Point Software Technologies - concluded that virtualisation security is a problem that will not go away and, if anything, will grow as more organisations migrate their IT systems to the technology. Hard on the heels of launching a range of dedicated servers based on Intel's Nehalem architecture last week, NetBenefit, the managed internet hosting firm, has added a virtual firewall - based on Fortinet's firewall technology - to its range of security offerings. Companies are embracing new web and mobile technologies such as cloud computing, virtualisation, social networking and mobile communication at a faster rate than their information security strategies are updated.[39] The companies will work together to deliver business-ready IT that aims to simplify and accelerate virtualization and the transition to cloud computing. The foundation for VCE is a shared vision for the future of private clouds -- virtual IT infrastructures securely controlled and operated by one organization that can be managed internally or by a third party and can exist on or off premises, or both.[28]

Some analysts were inclined to give the coalition the benefit of the doubt. "This could be good, it could give IT professionals a little bit of simplicity," said Andi Mann, a senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. By and large, enterprises prefer to buy integrated offerings rather than assemble best-of-breed technologies from piece parts, he said. The strength of the Cisco/EMC brand will be a powerful lure to large enterprises, said Chris Wolf, a senior analyst at Burton Group, especially as they start to think about cloud computing. "When organizations start thinking about the cloud, they don't want to go to Joe's Discount Service Provider," Wolf said. The infrastructure running Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud, for example, "is only good because Amazon tells us it is," he said, adding that "there's a reason why enterprises aren't putting their production workloads there."[7] Initial reaction to the announcement has been generally positive. Chris Wolf, a senior analyst at Burton Group, said organisations will be kindly disposed to Acadia and vBlock as they consider cloud computing,. "When organizations start thinking about the cloud, they don't want to go to Joe's Discount Service Provider," Wolf said. The infrastructure running Amazon EC2, for example, "is only good because Amazon tells us it is," he said, adding that "there's a reason why enterprises aren't putting their production workloads there."[41]

A report at Reuters suggests that the joint venture will sell a line of products called vBlock, which will focus on selling virtualized infrastructure for cloud computing.[11] Through the joint venture and new products, Cisco, the No. 1 vendor of networking gear, is making another incursion into the market for computer systems sold by IBM ( IBM ), Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ ), and Dell ( DELL ).[31] Cisco vice president of business development Manjula Talreja said the vendors will collaborate on product roadmaps going forward, and will also offer joint direct sales and service support.[34]

Rather than maintain long-term consulting and outsourcing deals for itself, over time it seeks to build up an ecosystem of service providers to develop the market themselves. That way, Cisco expands the market for its products, as well as its sky-high margins. Then again, this coalition is a new kind of animal.[12] Nearly three quarters of that money goes to paying for hardware, maintenance, and operating expenses, taking a major bite out of cash companies can devote to developing and deploying new products or services, Cisco said.[25]

Not having services has really locked Dell out of a lot of the potential business and while it has historically partnered, even with IBM Global Services, the result was that Dell really wasn'''t considered a true enterprise player. Dell may lack the breadth of products, both hardware and services, but what it does have sits in the middle of where most of the volume appears to be at the moment. This merger effectively now adds a fourth chair at the table for enterprise companies that can handle large-scale projects like private cloud efforts and once again changes the corporate dynamic.[40] Given the fact that Cisco's architecture is network-centric ab initio, it will be much easier to take on companies like IBM and HP which have been in the data centre and cloud business much earlier.[20]

IBM has always had the ability to offer complete systems and services from the days when the mainframe was the data center. HP sketched out its approach to data centers, its "converged infrastructure," that combines existing technologies and some new ones, including an updated Neoview enterprise data warehousing platform, into one single offering.[23] Analysts said Acadia is as good as anything arriving out of a merger. These mergers and joint agreements are giving the enterprise vendors the means to sell complete data center infrastructure environments.[23] Taylor Buley, 11.03.09, 03:55 PM EST The companies officially partner up with VMware to sell data center infrastructure.[29]

More than 350 billion dollars is spent annually worldwide on data center technology infrastructure and services, according to estimates attributed to business consulting firm McKinsey and Company.[25] Cisco Landing page www.cisco.com/govce Learn more about the Cisco Unified Computing System Learn more about Cisco Data Center Services Read " Cisco Data Center" blog Follow Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior on Twitter.[19] The idea of the Cisco/EMC/VMware data center in a box probably makes the most sense for greenfield environments, said Doug Willoughby, the director of cloud computing strategy at IT consultancy Compuware Corp. But it might falter in organizations with legacy investments.[7] The savings will accrue, the companies claim from lower IT costs, as as well reduced energy bills and real-estate savings, as data centres become virtualised and migrate to cloud computing environments.[39]

Eucalyptus CEO Woody Rollins credited Cisco and EMC for giving customers an easy way to embrace internal cloud computing.[17] The choice of vendor is secondary to me." Cisco, EMC and VMware said that initial customer analyses placed total cost of ownership savings at 40%, but that they had not divided that up in to capital and operational savings.[7] "By comparison, the VCE coalition allows Cisco, EMC and VMware to present clients a single face and common responsibility while preserving the partners' independence," King said. "That is, while the three will contribute significantly to VCE, they will also continue to work closely with various partners and with clients who prefer other vendors' products."[28] On balance, Cisco is out of my doghouse again, but I'm still not exactly drooling over the stock. How does this coalition change your thinking about Cisco, EMC, or VMware -- if at all? Let us know in the comments below.[35] An analyst said Cisco, EMC and VMware stand to profit from the coalition, along with Intel.[28]

Marc Farley at StorageRap sees potential culture conflicts ahead. "There is a lot of risk with vBlock for both EMC and Cisco," he writes. "Certainly, its an opportunity for Cisco and EMC to expand their markets, but sharing is hard for companies with voracious appetites and flattening revenue streams." "VMware is taking a lot of risks with this move," writes Alessandro Perilli.[43] Vblock 0 is also comprised of a repeatable model leveraging Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC's Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.[19] Designed for consolidation and optimization initiatives, Vblock 1 is comprised of a repeatable model leveraging Cisco's UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC's CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.[19]

Vblock 1 scales between 800 and 3,000 virtual machines, and includes Cisco's UCS, MDS, and Nexus 1000V, EMC's Clariion storage with RSA security, and vSphere. Pavone put the price range of this configuration at between $1 million and $3 million.[34] Vblock 0 will support between 300 and 800 virtual machines and contains the Cisco switches, vSphere and EMC's Celerra multiprotocol storage. Pavone estimated the price range of this configuration at $100,000 and up.[34] Vblock 0 is designed for configuration of 300 to 800 virtual machines and runs on the Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V, and EMC Unified Storage.[7]

Vblock 1 supports from 800 to 3,000 virtual machines, and adds in Cisco's MDS 9000 series of switches and Clarrion storage arrays.[3]

Vblock 1 scales from 800 to 3,000 VMs, leveraging the Cisco UCS, Nexus 1000V and MDS switches, and EMC Clariion storage.[7]

IBM and HP are the industry leaders when it comes to selling computer servers to businesses. By joining forces, EMC and Cisco can expand into that market quickly, offering integrated systems built with technology from both.[22] Oracle's acquisition of Sun, announced in April and approved by the DOJ in August, gives Oracle hardware capability. As well as teaming up with EMC, Cisco announced its decision in June to begin offering its own server hardware. HP's acquisition of EDS, completed one year ago, boosted its services capability considerably.[23] Competitors include IBM (NYSE: IBM ) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ). Both HP and Big Blue are big names in enterprise-class server systems and have been bolstering their cloudy credentials by service-oriented acquisitions over the last couple of years. This coalition takes a different angle at the same market, hoping to become a one-stop shop for large virtual installs but then handing off day-to-day support to the customer or to one of the many IT service businesses out there.[35]

The coalition will scale customer adoption of Vblock systems by enabling a global community of systems integrators, service providers, channel partners, and independent software vendors (ISVs).[19] As of Tuesday, the vendor coalition has already signed up six system integrators, six service providers and nine solution providers for the Vblock program, Peres said. Other partners will be able to sign on as they attain certification from all three vendors.[18] The three vendors currently have two Vblock packages available to integrator, service provider and solution provider partners, with one more on the way.[18]

The VBlock infrastructure packages combine products from all three vendors and will start at the entry level market for small data centres and rise up to mid-size configurations and large enterprises. [1] A comprehensive security framework based on EMC RSA security products, including RSA enVision, has been validated with Vblock Infrastructure Packages.[19]

Vblock Infrastructure Packages support a broad range of operating systems and applications, enabling partners and customers to rapidly migrate existing applications to Vblock, accelerating broad-scale virtualization and time to results.[19] Further Vblock Infrastructure Packages will be developed to serve business needs across three categories: shared services, applications and vertical industry solutions.[19] Vblock Infrastructure Packages can be easily scaled with additional compute and storage capability after purchase, a key differentiator versus today's monolithic IT systems.[19]

Vblock Packages amount to integrated server, networking, storage, security, virtualization and software technologies.[37] IT professionals aren't sold on the value of a new Cisco-EMC-VMware coalition to sell preconfigured bundles of servers, virtualization, networking and storage for enterprises that want to build private clouds.[7] In a press conference for reporters, the three companies said that the coalition will bring private cloud computing and virtualisation to enterprises, while at the same time simplifying the procedure and saving money for client organisations.[39] At GigaOm, Stacey Higginbotham takes a broader view of the impact on cloud computing. "Today'''s announcement divides compute clouds into those built on commodity gear and those that aren'''t, as well as showcases the split between how folks plan to deliver private clouds for enterprise customers," Stacey writes. "The choices made at both the hardware level and when a company is determining how private it wants to be will affect the economics of cloud computing profoundly."''[43]

"The business proposition around virtualisation and consolidation is strengthening, but what's happening with Vblock is giving a lot more credibility to private cloud computing," Descoeudres says.[27]

The venture may help EMC expand its footprint in the area of cloud computing, one of Chief Executive Joe Tucci's top areas of focus.[16]

For instance, the company purchased nLayers for application discovery and mapping technology in 2006. The next year the EMC picked up Voyence for its network change and configuration management technology. EMC acquired ITIL software maker Infra in 2008, and in 2009, EMC bought Configuresoft for its server configuration technology. All these buys could help EMC provide the configuration know-how needed to handle next-generation environments, according to Forrester Research.[6] As part of the news blast, EMC also introduced Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager software, which the company says is "designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles."[6] According to EMC, the coalition news also incorporates the company's recently re-branded, integrated management software portfolio.[6]

As Chambers pointed out in the call, Cisco has an excellent record at making acquisitions work, and it has a long heritage of successful partnerships. This deal takes partnering to a new, deeper level. "We'll behave as one company," says Chambers, who says the coalition will reinvent "how companies work together to serve their customers." Holding it together will be a great personal trust between the CEOs, they say. Tucci notes that he has known Chambers for 20 years, and was once his boss.[12] Edison Peres, senior vice president, worldwide channels and go to market for Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), said the coalition was driven in concert with the partner ecosystem each company shares. 'The bottom line with this coalition is that we shall work aggressively with system integrators and the channel to bring all of these realities to the market place. These are referenced architectures. The products sit at each other's company and have been brought together in VBlock,' he said.[1] Peres said that the number of qualified partners will be broadened out as the coalition moves forward. "The Vblocks are reference architectures, they are not SKUs," he said. "To make them come to life, you have to buy the products, and the partners make those products come to life. We will be more aggressive in enabling them going forward."[5]

The channel will be the go-to-market focus for Vblock and Acadia, Peres said. "The partner ecosystem is at the core of making this a reality to our partners," he said. Ben Matheson, senior director of global partner marketing at VMware, said the vendor coalition is targeting what could be a total market worth $85 billion by 2015, and as such it is a market too big for any vendor or group of vendors to tackle alone.[18]

Cisco and EMC are lead investors in Acadia, while VMware and Intel are minority investors. Acadia will have its own CEO, which the companies are searching for, and an initial staff of 130.[33] Cisco and EMC are the majority investors (how can you have two majority investors?) in the Acadia partnership, but VMware (which EMC likes to pretend is a separate company because Wall Street has a little slice of it) and Intel have also kicked in capital to get Acadia growing.[3] In addition to Cisco and EMC as the majority investors, the build-out of Acadia's global capabilities in 2010 also has been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel.[19]

My hunch is that Chambers would have rather done a deal based on equity, rather than solely trust. With more than $30 billion burning a hole in his pocket, it's likely Cisco sought to increase its 1.63% ownership of VMWare. He even admitted during the call that he envied EMC's majority stake (the storage maker owns 82% of VMWare).[12] OK, so EMC and VMware are mostly the same entity, but now Cisco is on board, not as an acquirer but as a partner.[50] Why? Because because of the 20-year relationship between Tucci and Chambers, and the partnership between Cisco and EMC - as well as VMware.[2] With Cisco's $131.2bn market capitalization and EMC's $33.6bn valuation (not including the $15.4bn valuation for VMware), neither can afford to buy the other.[11] EMC, Cisco, VMware, Dell and Oracle clearly want a seat at the super-company table.[40]

The alliance with EMC and EMC'''s majority-owned VMware is aimed at dislodging Hewlett-Packard and IBM from atop the $350bn annual market for core computing products, consulting and maintenance.[49] IBM, naturally, would be the other big one. Outside of general information about its Blue Cloud initiative and partnership opportunities to create next-gen data centers, we have yet to hear a clear strategy from IT's Biggest Kahuna on the unified computing topic. Smaller upstarts, such as Liquid Computing, are also coming into the picture.[45] Big businesses use data centers - large arrays of computers and storage gear - that are often cobbled together with products from various vendors, and are difficult to manage.[22] DatacenterDynamics delivers knowledge and networking opportunities to professionals that design, build and operate data centers through a combination of conferences, magazines, websites and research products.[51]

The nLayer discovery, coupled with Infra, Voyence and Configuresoft, gives EMC Ionix an edge over the competition in CCM. Data Center Insight is certainly the best solution on the market today," an October Forrester Research report reads.[6] "It's a 'virtual block' of the data center. You can buy it from them as a service, then eventually transition it to your own data center", Reuters quoted one of the people familiar with the plan as saying.[8]

Derek Cockerton, HP's director for BladeSystem, Software and HPC in EMEA, says BladeSystem Matrix is: "a shared services infrastructure delivered to your data centre. a cloud in a box."[46] The chief executive officer of Sydney-based managed and cloud hosting provider Ultra Serve, Samuel Yeats, said more independent software vendors would be promoting cloud, off-premise, and data centre technologies to remain relevant over the next six months. "Whether they choose to build and deliver these services themselves, or partner with an organisation with established services and experience will be the question," he said.[27]

Gartner defines cloud computing as a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to internal customers using Internet technologies. "The point is, how the provider delivers the service is hidden from the user," he said.[37] A cloud computing trend that gained momentum during the global economic crisis consists of offering software programs online as services, sparing users from having to buy, install, and maintain applications.[25]

Several internal cloud vendors have argued that the key to building private clouds is the aggregation of many types of technologies from rival vendors into a centrally managed computing pool, and have built software to achieve that.[17] In companies with a private cloud, computing and storage resources would be centrally managed and easily accessed by workers in various departments.[22]

The entire community of partners will augment, sell and deliver Vblock solutions to accelerate the journey to pervasive virtualization and private cloud for organizations of all sizes.[19] King said organizations can benefit from VCE's Vblock architecture and solutions through Intel-based, industry-standard computing and the partners' well-established technology solutions, along with significantly reduced risk and cost via the coalition's rigorous pre-integration and validation process.[28] In Canada, FlexITy, CDW, Dimension Data and Forsythe, who is new to the country have been signed by the coalition. Peres added that partner training, certification, enablement and the profitability programs that the channel works with today will be offered for these validated VBlock designs.[1] As the coalition kicks off, that role in delivering the Vblock Packages to customers is limited to a fairly small number of partners.[5]

Until the Vblock announcement, the three vendors have referred to themselves as "VCE," or "VMware-Cisco-EMC," or "Virtual Computing Environment," Jones said. "Many members of our sales teams and customers have been having trouble understanding what 'VCE' means," he said.[4] Vblock is designed to extend a customer's existing enterprise security controls to the virtual infrastructure and does not require the customer to replace security software already in place.[19] The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure on Vblock solutions will enhance the provisioning, scale-out and back-end management of enterprise applications and users.[19]

Everyone expects that the Atmos compute clouds are based on Cisco servers and switches. They are being virtualized with the ESX Server 3.5 hypervisor and their Virtual Infrastructure 3 tools, not the latest ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor and related vSphere 4.0 tools, which is a bit odd.[11] Instead of the old Adaptive Infrastructure initiative from a few years ago, we now have the Converged Infrastructure Architecture, which HP pitches as a "roadmap for CIOs to thrive in unpredictability". (Cisco and EMC are selling three different configurations of virtualized infrastructure with feeds and speeds and prices.)[38] Succeeding in services is traditionally thought of as a matter of scale: The more consultants a company has, the more business it can take on. Cisco and EMC say their goal isn'''t to be a one-stop-shop that operates the hardware it installs in perpetuity.[36] Cisco and EMC executives said Acadia will function as a services and integration organization.[34] While rivals like H-P, Dell and Xerox all went big into services spending billions of dollars each to buy EDS, Perot Systems and ACS Cisco and EMC are taking a different approach.[36]

Vblock 2, designed for service providers and the largest enterprises, can host 3,000 to 6,000 VMs and utilizes EMC's high-end V-Max storage.[7] Vblock 2 is a high-end configuration supporting up to 3,000-6,000 virtual machines that is completely extensible to meet the most demanding IT needs of large enterprises and service providers.[19]

Initial partner involvement is also limited because what will likely prove to be the most attractive solution for the channel, the entry-level Vblock 0, which supports between 300 and 800 virtual machines, won't be on the market until 2010.[5] Initially, three Vblock packages are being offered: an entry-level Vblock 0 which supports from 300 to 800 virtual machines; Vblock 1 which supports between 800 to 3000 virtual machines; and Vblock 2 which supports from 3000 to 6000 virtual machines.[39]

The timing of a hodge-podge of system announcements that HP is stacking up against the Vblock stacks and whatever integrated systems Oracle and Sun Microsystems might cook up if the European Commission ever allows the Sun acquisition to go through. HP is taking a two-prong attack today, saying that the automation and management technologies that it originally developed for its x64-based BladeSystem and packaged up as the BladeSystem Matrix and its Matrix Orchestration Environment has been expanded to support Integrity blade servers. That means the Matrix boxes can support HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems and their workloads and are not just restricted to x64-based ProLiant blades and their Windows and Linux operating systems. The Integrity blades also support Linux and Windows, of course, as well as the NonStop environment for fault tolerant clusters, and presumably these can also be controlled by the Matrix environment. [38] Instead of the Matrix Operating Environment (which is itself a hodge-podge of stuff), HP is now rolling out something called the Infrastructure Operating Environment, which doesn't appear to be a new product so much as a brand to slap onto HP's Insight Dynamics, Insight Control, and Business Technology Optimization tools. Pity the sales rep trying to explain this stuff, and how it might - or might not - relate to one of HP's five strategic operating system platforms. If HP has simplified IT, it has made its product line and sales pitch unnecessarily complex.[38] Acadia will start with 140 employees, but most of the sales of the new technology bundles will come from outside consulting firms to promote Cisco's server business.[32] The new venture, called Acadia, will only have about 130 employees when it launches in the first quarter of 2010, says Cisco CEO John Chambers.[36]

For Cisco, the world's biggest maker of networking equipment, the venture could help kick-start the company's move into the computer server market. It launched its first line of computer servers earlier this year.[16] "Wherever you touch any one of the three of us, we will look like one company,'' said Cisco chief executive John Chambers. Cisco, long known for its equipment used in computer networks, this year started making servers, large computers that store and process information.[22]

People working on virtual computers get the performance and appearance of an independent machine while actually sharing servers, meaning businesses spend less on equipment, energy and maintenance. "Customers are increasingly looking to virtualization to dramatically improve the performance and flexibility of their existing IT systems," said VMware chief executive Paul Maritz. [25] VMware makes "virtualization" software that dramatically increases the number of tasks that can be performed on a single computer. Companies around the world are embracing virtualization because it lets them buy fewer computers and cut energy costs.[15]

While Microsoft and Cisco have long claimed to be in existing in contented co-opetition with each other, the coalition is not good news for Redmond's ambitions in virtualization software. Cisco is expected to announce new collaboration technologies on Nov. 9, which should turn up the heat on the rivalry in this important market.[12] "But it may not be the best thing for your business." Grant said he was planning to watch the new coalition, but is concerned about getting locked in with one vendor. He also said it seemed VMware may be in a difficult position as a result of the new alliance. "Some of the moves they've taken to protect their market share are a bit confusing," Grant said. "Virtualization is almost like open source - it's been platform agnostic.[34] The new alliance will focus on virtualization and storage technology as well as networking for datacenters, which seems entirely reasonable given what each company does.[50]

The answer was simple, the network was becoming IP-centric and the IP network is taking over and subsuming the telephony network. The data centre is just like that and the same is happening where compute is concerned, he added. The switching and networking giant had shocked the tech-world a few months back when it announced it was getting into the data centre and would start selling storage and virtualisation stacks with its Unified Computing Solutions (UCS). While, the UCS offerings are being test marketed in the North American markets they are slated to be launched in India in December, Charney said. Copyright permission mandatory to republish this article.[20]

Peres cautioned that Acadia is not outsourcing, but a way to fully enable a customer or partner to operate a virtualized data centre.[1] "Our investment in Acadia will provide a deployment option for customers looking to take advantage of Intel's latest data center innovations."[19] "I would venture to guess that I'd be able to negotiate a better pricing structure individually than with the added overhead of a combined organization." David Grant, a data center manager with a large communications company he also requested not be identified, said he prefers to come up with his own recipe for IT. "Obviously these guys are in business to make money, and the more of your data center they own, the more money they make, so good for them," he said.[34] Wikibon analyst David Vellante said VCE will also have to make an arrangement with Oracle if the goal is to virtualize all applications in the data center. "Today, the focus for virtualization is around consolidating the infrastructure and getting better utilization, and the next phase becomes encapsulating applications," he said.[34] Just look at what happened to Cisco's relationships with IBM/HP/Sun after it announced unified data center."[6]

"We believe the future is in the network where the data flow as opposed to compute-flow is the critical path with switching, which is Cisco's core competence, playing a crucial role," Charney said in an exclusive chat on the sidelines of a Business Technology Summit at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) here.[20] For sure, Cisco is drifting far away from their flagship multi-protocol/IP routing and Ethernet switching roots. Last week they acquired an Internet security firm. It appears Cisco is transforming itself into an amalgamation of many different companies. They want to be an Internet software company (Web Wx, Internet security), consumer electronics company for the connected home, cable and satellite TV set top box provider, video conferencing for business. It's hard to characterize and evaluate such a company.[10] With all the recent announcements, we wonder what kind of a company Cisco has evolved into? They seem to want to provide a solution to every conceivable IT market segment. This morning I heard a KCBS radio commercial about Cisco delivering movies over a private network in a dentist's office.[10]

For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com. About EMC EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. [24] About VMware VMware (NYSE: VMW) delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes.[24]

The Acadia venture will include virtualization technologies from VMware, a subsidiary of EMC. Intel is also a minority investor.[44] VMware and chip maker Intel Corp. are investors in the Acadia joint venture.[22]

The Wall Street Journal reported in September that the companies were planning a joint venture to provide services.[36]

Only a small number of corporations are interested in buying 300 or more servers at once, the minimum that the partnership will sell, said Gartner analyst Tom Bittman. "This is a good offering. It's an important offering, but it's a limited market," he said. The companies may eventually offer smaller blocks of servers, expanding their market opportunity, he added. They will establish one sales, professional services and support team for their products.[9] Vblock is not a product offering in itself, said Mitch Breen, senior vice president of global channel strategy and sales at EMC. "These are not specific SKUs stock keeping units," Breen said. "They are validated architectures to let partners bring our technologies to market."[18] "The certifications now are separate, but we are starting to talk about in Phase Two developing an integrated approach," Peres said. "We are working as diligently as possible to make this a seamless experience for partners, but no specific timetable for this has been established," said Mitch Breen, Senior Vice President, Global Channel Strategy and Sales, at EMC.[5]

EMC's Chad Sakacs ''steps up to the questions about VMware's independence and offers an insider's view. "EMC understands that we cannot hug VMware too closely," he writes. "They must be able to partner openly.VMware is, and will continue to be, an independent company, that makes it'''s own independent decisions, and openly partners with those that partner with them.''"[43] One IT manager said he would like to be able to buy hosted Cisco-EMC-VMware capacity in a pinch but saw little value in buying their gear from a single company. "Unless they decided to deeply discount it, I don't know if there'd be value in it," said Tom Becchetti, a Unix and storage engineer at a large Midwestern manufacturing firm that uses VMware and EMC storage.[7]

EMC launched the Atmos storage utility in May and the compute cloud went into beta in early October and is presumably being readied for launch.[11] Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage offers data protection, data integrity, security, and privacy, but starts at a price of 25 cents per GByte per month.[18]

HP is betting that users will invest in new technology, in part because of what it learned by interviewing more than 400 CIOs worldwide. In that survey, more than 70% of the respondents said that they would sanction more IT investment if it was improving time to market and creating opportunities. Deborah Nelson, senior vice president marketing of HP Enterprise Business, said they customers believes that the market will be unpredictable for several years and that is driving customers to seek improved insight, as well improvements in the ability to drive revenue.[23] Advertisement Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service. Its award-winning CRM solution helps 43,600 customers worldwide manage and share business information over the Internet.[28]

Vblocks do rely on any proprietary hardware and can be configured to meet customers' specific needs, said Todd Pavone, EMC's vice president of global solutions. "The different options will have minimums and maximums, but clearly there will be a level of customization to meet unique requirements," he said.[7] Some potential VCE customers are wary of the new lines in the sand being drawn among vendors. "The prices for Vblocks seem high," said Tom Becchetti, who works with a Fortune 200 company that he requested not be identified because of corporate policy forbidding him to use its name publicly.[34] "Making it easy for people to experiment with and deploy on-premise or private clouds is a really good move," Rollins says. Many customers prefer being able to combine various technologies over a one-size-fits-all approach that introduces the risk of vendor lock-in, he says. "What they're trying to do with Vblock is create a turnkey approach and I think that's fine, as long as you want what it does out of the box," Rollins says. "But it's not very open and it isn't very flexible."[17]

While the Cisco/EMC cloud package consists of the two companies' proprietary systems, it could still be integrated into existing private cloud networks, industry observers say.[17]

The companies have created a "Virtual computing environment coalition" that the three companies refer to as "VCE."[41] "We're seeing larger companies being fairly comfortable talking about a longer term move towards a cloud computing model."[27] "Today's announcement provides a compelling vision and set of roadmaps valuable to any company looking to harness cloud computing in a fundamentally more pragmatic and non-disruptive way."[25] Descoeudres said that two of the three initial clients are heading towards a private cloud computing strategy.[27] What are the threats arising in cloud computing and what security providers are doing to provide solutions.[46] The Oracle-Sun deal began to look like a disaster. Individually, these are interesting moves. Collectively, they indicate a changing power structure in the enterprise space, and all of this will directly affect the move to cloud computing.[40]

The move aims to boost Cisco's share on the market for computing products, consulting and maintenance. [48] Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.[19]

Whether the deal, unveiled in a long, nearly impenetrably jargony press release, actually improves the competitive position of Cisco and EMC against Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which is probably the real goal here, remains to be seen.[26] With an enterprise value of $31 billion, EMC would be a massive meal for ultra-rich Cisco, but not impossibly large.[35]

Today, EMC is introducing Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager as an integrated, unified element manager for Vblock.[19] There's also'' several posts on''Cisco's blogs.'' "Vblocks are''a great''example of a platform that delivers a top to bottom, integrated solution to enable businesses to hit the ground running, but it remains to be seen if IT will consume infrastructure in this manner," he writes. "IT is accustomed to procuring a bunch of individual pieces and bolting them together (sometimes with super glue and duct tape)."''''[43] RSA security solutions are layered onto the Vblock architecture to deliver security policy management and security at three levels: identity, information and infrastructure.[19]

The brain though, is the management layer, software that's broad enough to cover the entire data centre and deep enough to go into the individual organs inside the infrastructure, and treat everything there as just another VDC component.[46] "We are going to add things to Vblock to see that it is differentiated," said VMware's Ayyar, for example, expanded management software.[7] Speaking of customization, the VMware vSphere software running on Vblocks might not be the same as that running on other hardware platforms.[7]

With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 150,000 customers and 22,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. [24] With the industry leading virtualization platform -- VMware vSphere(TM) -- customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green.[24]

Even if the customers work directly with the EMC support teams, our intent is to have the partners handle the business." [18] CEO Chambers should better articulate Cisco's corporate strategy and direction to reassure shareholders, customers, and partners.[10] The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. This document is Cisco Public Information.[19] The initial number of qualified partners is limited because it required partners who were fully qualified on the systems from all three vendors, said Edison Peres, SVP, Worldwide Channels GTM, Cisco. "The targeted partners needed to be able to deliver on each of the three, so the initial list is the partners certified by all three who said they wanted to build an active practise around these packages," Peres said.[5]

Bangalore: If Howard Charney, senior vice-president, Cisco Systems Inc, is to be believed, it should be a cakewalk to take on IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the cloud, given that it is more network-centric than the rival giants, which are server-centric. He should know. [20] Almost everyone noted the likely targets. The New York Times' Ashlee Vance states, "the arrangement should aid the company's efforts to sell its nascent line of computer servers and increase competition against the likes of Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell."[29] The new company, to be called Acadia, will offer a bundle of computer hardware and services.[48]

Following deployment, Acadia would transfer support of the infrastructure to a joint channel partner/systems integrator, another service provider or the end user.[34] The coalition has also established unified presales, professional services and support capabilities to simplify customer engagement.[19]

Note 1: Worldwide spending by businesses and other organizations on technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates, with half of that spent on capital expenses (products) and half on operating expenses (services and labor).[19] Part of that effort has been through acquisitions. One example is the scale out storage technology HP acquired through its acquisition this summer of IBRIX, a privately held company in Billerica, Mass. Its technology has been integrated in HP's converged offerings.[23] Today, HP is announcing the grown-up version of the VirtualConnect virtual I/O for the BladeSystem machines, which it is calling FlexFabric. It is a mix of VirtualConnect switches for blades and ProCurve switches for racks and big SMP boxes, that will allow HP shops to wire their servers once and, through the magic of virtual Ethernet port aggregation (VEPA), allow workloads to move around the network of servers and have their network and storage connections follow them.[38] BladeSystem Matrix is at the heart of HP's virtual data centre (VDC) concept.[46]

A private cloud is a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. It can be managed either by that organization or a third party, and it can exist on or off premises or in combination. [19] Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, said: "There are no easy solutions for the private cloud today.[21]

Data management and storage solutions, tips and best practices to improve the scalability, reliability, and accessability of your data.[40] VCE has created a new line of jointly-created products, called "vBlock." All of these components are managed with a single, unified, management interface.[41] Half of that amount is spent on capital expenses -- product acquisition -- and half on operating expenses. Roughly 70% or more of those costs are allotted to maintaining existing infrastructures, leaving 30% or less for new technology purchases.[42]

The emphasis, according to the coompanies, is on freeing corporate buyers and carriers from being locked-in to any one supplier or technology. "This brings together three companies that have a record of being open," Cisco CEO John T. Chambers said. [12] '''Every successful company has a heart and soul,''' says EMC CEO Joe Tucci, explaining why the companies didn'''t try to build a thousand-person-plus consulting organization.[36] EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci said in an interview that the rumors may have been sparked as investors got wind of the close talks between the two companies that led to the partnership over the past few years.[9]

Some resources from the partnership. Chuck Hollis from EMC points to PrivateCloud.com, the new information hub created by the VCE partners.[43]

Liquid is collaborating with Intel to produce the new Liquid Elements unified computing software package that will be gaining attention soon.[45]

Easily Monitor Virtual, Physical, and Cloud based assets, applications and services from a unified Dashboard with up.time. [45] Using the Cisco/EMC cloud tools alone could be limiting, Harris argues, because not every application is ready to run in a virtual machine. A better approach, he says, is to build resource pools that contain both physical and virtual servers.[17]

SourceMedia is an Investcorp company. Use, duplication, or sale of this service, or data contained herein, is strictly prohibited. [44] Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services, and Wipro are ready to go today as channel partners peddling the Vblock gear.[3]

SOURCES

1. Cisco, EMC and VMware form a coalition
2. Inside Acadia: the Cisco, EMC, VMware love child explained ''' The Register
3. Cisco, EMC, and VMware join hands and plunge into cloud ''' Channel Register
4. Cisco, EMC, VMware Partners: We'd Like Some Vblock Details, Please - Storage - IT Channel News by CRN
5. eChannelLine USA - The VCE coalition: what's in it for the channel
6. Cisco, EMC and VMware coalition nets unified management software for virtual, cloud environments - Network World
7. Cisco-VMware-EMC coalition leaves IT users cold
8. Cisco And EMC Clasp Hands To Ramp Up Their Cloud Offerings: Sources - ITProPortal.com
9. Cisco and EMC plan partnership, not merger | U.S. | Reuters
10. Cisco is a ____ company? Strong push into data centers | The Viodi View
11. Cisco and EMC in joint venture blitz ''' The Register
12. Can Cisco Prove It's The Most Open Of Them All? - BusinessWeek
13. Cisco-EMC joint venture likely to be announced this week | TopNews United States
14. A Virtual Computing Environment love affair for Cisco, EMC, and VMware | Virtualization - InfoWorld
15. Cisco and EMC team up - Daily Business Update - The Boston Globe
16. Cisco, EMC team up on cloud computing: sources | Technology | Reuters
17. Cisco/EMC cloud packages proprietary, but may not cause lock-in - Network World
18. Cisco, EMC, VMware Channel Chiefs Talk Up Vblock Partner Play - Storage - IT Channel News by CRN
19. Cisco and EMC, Together With VMware, Form Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures
20. Cisco to ride network to the cloud - dnaindia.com
21. iTWire - Cisco, EMC & VMWare form data centre coalition
22. EMC, Cisco alliance takes on computing giants IBM, HP - The Boston Globe
23. Big IT is back, say HP, IBM, Oracle, EMC, Cisco
24. Cisco and EMC Together With VMware to Host News Webcast
25. AFP: Cisco-EMC-VMware alliance in 350-bln-dollar market
26. Cisco, EMC, VMware Launch Cloud Computing Push - Tech Trader Daily - Barrons.com
27. NetStar lines up for Vblock kit - Networking - Technology - News - CRN Australia
28. NewsFactor Business | VCE Gives Cisco, EMC and VMware a Single Face
29. Cisco And EMC Cool Merger Rumors - Forbes.com
30. Cisco, EMC, VMware Unveil IT Joint Venture - WSJ.com
31. Cisco's EMC Venture: Better Than a Buyout? - BusinessWeek
32. Cisco partners with EMC to take on HP and IBM | 4 Nov 2009 | ComputerWeekly.com
33. Cisco, EMC announce cloud partnership - Computerworld Blogs
34. Enterprise data storage industry looks to EMC, Cisco and VMware's alliance with caution
35. Cisco and VMware: This Is a Hug, Not a Marriage (CSCO)
36. Cisco, EMC Go Targeted for Services - Digits - WSJ
37. Analysis: Cisco, EMC, VMware partnership is a long shot
38. HP to throw Matrix tech beyond x64 blades ''' The Register
39. Infosecurity (UK) - Cisco, EMC and VMware form cloud computing coalition
40. EMC, Cisco, Dell, Oracle Shoot for Super-Company Status | Blogs | ITBusinessEdge.com
41. No Acadia for Australia until customers demand it :: SearchStorage.com.au
42. Cisco, EMC unveil data center joint venture
43. Roundup: The VCE Alliance & Its Implications '' Data Center Knowledge
44. Cisco, EMC Partner In Data Center Push
45. HP vs. Cisco: Polar Opposites in Data Center Strategies
46. EMC/Cisco's V-Block faces the hard Cell from HP ''' The Register
47. The New Player on the vBlock
48. US Cisco, EMC set up JV
49. FT.com / Technology - Cisco and EMC form joint venture
50. Cisco, EMC, VMware Form Alliance -- Redmond Channel Partner
51. DatacenterDynamics - No.1 global data center events

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