Cisco, EMC & VMWare form data centre coalition

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 05:53

IT Industry - Strategy

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.

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 unveiled 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.

Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, said: "There are no easy solutions for the private cloud today. People have to try and assemble the pieces themselves. VCE provides a clear roadmap. It brings together best of breed technologies in the areas of virtualisation, network, compute and storage in a way that has been thought through and is easy to implement. This partnership is about taking complexity out of the equation making things simpler to consumer and to deploy and making it quicker to realise the benefits of technology."

Cisco CEO, John Chambers, said: "I believe this is a coalition that will change the future of the industry

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.

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