(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — IT firms Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com), EMC (www.emc.com) and VMware (www.vmware.com) announced on Tuesday it has formed a new alliance entitled the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition, which is designed to “help organizations simplify and accelerate pervasive virtualization and the transition to private cloud infrastructures”.
The three companies have worked closely over the past year with a common vision for using private cloud computing to help customers more effectively increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs.
The alliance combines the strengths of the three IT leaders, with Cisco being a leading manufacturer of networking equipment, EMC a top producer of stand-alone data-storage systems and VMware a major developer of virtualization software.
EMC owns 85 percent of VMware following its acquisition of VMware for $625 million in January 2004.
The initiative targets those customers with between 800 to 6,000 virtual machines. The first customer trials of VCE, entitled Vblock Infrastructure Packages, have seen up to 40 percent in cost reductions for operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures.
Built around private clouds, Vblockck Infrastructure Packages include a range of features that let a global community of systems integrators, service providers, channel partners, and independent software vendors participate in the deployment of VCE.
EMC introduced its Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager to Vblock, as well as developing RSA security products, the security division of EMC, for use with Vblock packages.
The recent cloud computing trend has seen major technology companies such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and IBM creating varying alliances, as they compete for greater market share in the highly lucrative market.
Cisco, in particular, has played a proactive role in increasing its market share for corporate technology products and services.
In January, the company announced it would enter the blade server market, selling its own computing boards to corporate data centers through companies like HP and Dell.
As a direct response to this, other server vendors and even some longtime Cisco partners have partnered with Cisco’s competitors, such as Brocade Communications, which expanded its partnerships with IBM and Dell earlier this year.
