This coalition is a an alliance/coalition/joint venture between Cisco and EMC with investments from Intel and VMware. Acadia is aimed at next generation data centers that are designed to deliver private cloud infrastructure. By joining forces, EMC and Cisco can expand into the server market quickly, offering integrated systems built with technology from both.
The integrated systems, called VBlock Infrastructure Packages, will allow customers to buy all the equipment and software they need together, from one seller. EMC and Cisco will offer systems that would allow customers to install new software or manage company information from a single control center. The new venture will focus on designing and building systems that rely on virtualization technology, which can help customers create a more flexible technology infrastructure and lower their capital spending costs.
The alliance could be a major boost to Cisco’s effort to expand beyond the networking equipment business. In 2009 Cisco launched the Unified Computing System, a new line of server computers. This put Cisco in competition against industry titans IBM and HP, which sell integrated computers and storage products. EMC and VMware are dominant players in storage and server virtualization, technology that allows many computers to run together as efficiently as one machine, but can’t match IBM and HP in servers or Cisco in networking.
“They’ve taken server, networking, and storage and put them together into a single unit,’’ Mark Bowker, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford said.
Big issue here is the openness of the platform. None of these players are known for their embrace of open software, and most are far more famous for squeezing high margins out of proprietary code. IBM and Rackspace have been pushing for some type of open cloud effort, which it defines as being built through a standards group. Vblocks are a refutation of that model, and of the idea that commodity hardware will underlie most clouds.
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