CALIFORNIA, USA: Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, introduced the virtual computing environment coalition.

The coalition has been created to accelerate customers’ ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data centre virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.

John Chambers, CEO, Cisco, said: "The announcement addresses our customers' greatest challenges and opportunities in the data centre. This coalition is about more than technology and partnership. It is about an entirely new and unique approach to the data centre that improves utilization, power consumption and security of information, all in a way that lowers the total cost to the customer, not via a box, but with a network-based architectural approach for optimizing virtual resources."

Cisco, EMC and VMware have worked closely over the past year on a shared vision for the future of enterprise IT infrastructure – private cloud computing.

A private cloud is a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. It can be managed either by that organization or a third party, and it can exist on or off premises or in combination. Private cloud computing offers the controls and security of today’s data centre with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs.

Joseph Tucci, chairman and CEO, EMC, said: "Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, are coming together in an unprecedented way to help our customers. They need to be able to shift more of their IT budgets to the development and rapid implementation of new technologies that help their organizations create differentiated business advantages.

The virtual computing environment coalition offers organizations an accelerated approach to data centre transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses. As a result, organisations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor accountability.

With the introduction of Vblock TM infrastructure packages, the virtual computing environment coalition will provide customers with a fundamentally better approach to streamlining and optimizing IT strategies around private clouds.

Paul Maritz, president and CEO, VMware, said: "Customers are increasingly looking to virtualization to dramatically improve the performance and flexibility of their existing IT systems."

Vblock is fully integrated, tested, validated, and ready-to-go/ready-to-grow infrastructure packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, 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 (ISVs). The coalition has also established unified presales, professional services and support capabilities to simplify customer engagement.

In unveiling the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, Cisco and EMC 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 expanded capabilities in 2010 has also been capitalized by investments from VMware and Intel. Because the

Vblock architecture relies heavily 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 latest Intel technology for servers, storage, and networking.