IT News Europe

Cisco and information infrastructure services developer EMC have entered into a contract with VMware to introduce the Virtual Computing Environment coalition. With the introduction of Vblock Infrastructure Packages, the Virtual Computing Environment coalition will provide customers with an approach to streamlining and optimising IT strategies around private clouds. Vblock Infrastructure Packages are fully integrated, tested, and validated infrastructure packages that combine virtualisation, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware with end-to-end vendor accountability. 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. The coalition has also established unified presales, professional services and support capabilities to simplify customer engagement. The family of Vblock Infrastructure Packages being offered by the Virtual Computing Environment coalition includes Vblock 2, Vblock 1 and Vblock 0. EMC is also introducing Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager as an integrated, unified element manager for Vblock. As an element manager, Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager is designed to support a range of enterprise management consoles. A security framework based on EMC RSA security products, including RSA enVision, has been validated with Vblock Infrastructure Packages. Vblock Infrastructure Packages are scheduled to be available this quarter direct from authorised systems integrators and channel partners.

Cisco and EMC have 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 model for delivering the Vblock architecture, addressing people, process and technology, will offer customers further choice to virtualise IT infrastructures and evolve to private cloud environments. 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. As the Vblock architecture relies on Intel Xeon processors and other Intel data centre technology, Intel will join the Acadia effort as a minority investor to facilitate and accelerate customer adoption of the new Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.

Source: Telecompaper