Cisco, EMC and VMware unite for the cloud

Three giants of the tech industry, Cisco, EMC and a href="http://www.vmware.com" target="_blank"]VMware[/a] have joined forces to form the Virtual Computing Environment coalition.

It is aimed at helping businesses to cut costs and increase flexibility through private cloud adoption and data centre virtualisation.

The coalition's first release is a Vblock Infrastructure Package offering virtualisation, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies in a private cloud for a range of business sizes.

"It is not just about storage, it is not just about compute power and it is not just about networking," said Paul Mauritz, chief executive of VMware, said during a webcast. "It is about bringing them together."

There are three models: Vblock 0 designed for 300 to 800 virtual machines, Vblock 1 aimed at medium businesses with 3,000 virtual machines and Vblock 2 made for up to 6,000 virtual machines.

In addition to offering joint customer support, the three companies along with Intel have set up Acadia to help build and operate the infrastructure of a private cloud offering with Vblock.

John Chambers, chief executive of Cisco, said on the webcast: "This is phase one of what the coalition will do. It is a multi-phase, multi-year roadmap which will change the data centre. This is a great start."

Vblock 1 and 2 are available now with the 0 model coming in the next few weeks. Acadia will launch close to the new year in 2010.