Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware today announced a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product, dubbed vBlock.
The venture will sell and provide maintenance and service support for the product, and combine EMC’s storage equipment, Cisco’s virtualized servers and networking equipment as well as VMWare’s virtualization technology. Executives at the three companies said the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition will “help organizations simplify and accelerate pervasive virtualization and the transition to private cloud infrastructures.”
The deal had been rumored since September, when the Wall Street Journal reported the companies were working on a collaborative effort code-named Alpine. Talk of the deal heated up late last week and early this week.
More information is available here.