Cisco, EMC and VMware announce cloud coalition

Paul Maritz, Joe Tucci and John Chambers announcing the Virtual Computing Environment coalition

Cisco, EMC and VMware have today announced the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, a long-rumoured three-way collaboration designed to boost business agility and the adoption of virtualisation.

The companies claimed in a press call today that the coalition will bring private cloud computing and virtualisation to enterprises, while simplifying the procedure and saving money.

Savings could come from lower energy, IT and real-estate costs, for example, as datacentres become virtualised and moved onto cloud services.

The collaboration is the result of a year's work, the firms said, and is pitched at organisations of all sizes.

The VCE's Vblock Infrastructure Packages offer a stack including EMC's storage equipment, Cisco's virtualised servers and networking equipment, and VMware's virtualisation technology. Early customer trials of Vblock packages have led to a 40 per cent saving in datacentre operation and management costs, the trio said.

John Chambers, chairman and chief executive at Cisco, claimed that the coalition will provide customers with best-of-breed solutions across the board.

The products had been built through "tight development", Chambers said, and customers will be supported by "end-to-end accountability" as the three companies will act as one to meet customer demands. "What we are announcing today is truly changing the industry," he said.

Vblocks can scale up and down depending on demand, and are designed to work with equipment from other firms and independent software vendors, according to the coalition.

Joe Tucci, chairman and chief executive at EMC, explained that cloud services are currently seen as weak, particularly in areas such as security, and that the coalition had been designed to help customers "transition their datacentres int o the virtualised datacentres of tomorrow".

He added that the trio had worked together on pre-testing and pre-integrating the ingredients in order to give customers a "safer journey".

The companies also announced Acadia, a collaboration with Intel designed to speed up the rollout of private cloud infrastructures at internet service providers and large organisations.

Three Vblock packages will be offered at launch. The entry-level Vblock 0 supports 300 to 800 virtual machines, while Vblock 1 supports 800 to 3,000 virtual machines. The high-end Vblock 2 supports 3,000 to 6,000 virtual machines.