Cisco, EMC & VMWare form data centre coalition

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 05:53

IT Industry - Strategy

The three companies have not talked about new product development at this stage, rather about complete data centres systems build using their existing products but with the selection of appropriate products, testing and integration performed by their respective channel partners.

There is one new product, the EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager, billed as "an integrated, unified element manager for Vblock....designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles."

To provide security "A comprehensive security framework based on EMC RSA security products, including RSA enVision, has been validated with Vblock Infrastructure Packages...to deliver security policy management and security at three levels: identity, information and infrastructure."

These joint solutions will be marketed and sold as "Vblock Infrastructure Packages" designed for specific needs. There are presentlhy three offerings.

Vblock 0 will be an entry-level configuration available in 2010, supporting from 300 to 800 virtual machine and comprising Cisco's UCS and Nexus 1000v, EMC's Unified Storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform. The partners claim it brings the benefits of private clouds within reach of medium-sized businesses, small data centres or organisations for the first time.

Vblock 1 is a mid-sized configuration supporting 800 up to 3,000 virtual machines designed for organizations of all sizes. It comprises Cisco's UCS, Nexus 1000v and MDS, EMC's CLARiiON storage (secured by RSA), and the VMware vSphere platform.

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