Cisco, EMC, and VMware make alliance official

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware announced Tuesday a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product.

The venture will sell and provide maintenance and service support for the product, which is called V-Block. It will combine EMC's storage equipment, Cisco's virtualized servers and networking equipment, and VMware's virtualization technology.

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.

The joint venture will market and provide maintenance for the product. But the cloud infrastructure will be built by all three companies.

Cisco and EMC already have a partnership to collaborate around Cisco's new data center platform, which the company calls Unified Computing. And EMC owns nearly 85 percent of VMware.

The companies will provide more details about the joint venture during a press call scheduled for 8:30 a.m. PT.

[thecatch]

Here is the first recent times attempt at the Cloud Backbone.

I read the 'WHITE PAPER' put out by Cisco in June of last year, this attempt will not win the race.

To much overhead, to little performance. I mean terrible numbers, and the amount of hardware needed to produce these numbers was silly.

Virtualization can not power the cloud, because Virtualization can not provide performance gains, speed & output. It's that simple.

This is a band aid attempt at Cloud Computing.

You need a real OS that can run the INTEL multiple core CPU's. All current OS's can't. None of them. That's why we have only a Quad Core to talk about. And a 6 core offering to come. Why not 8 you ask, because the current OS's can't run the new multiple core CPU's.

We need a Parallel Processing OS and then we will have the cloud, and CPU's that can be scheduled into the 100's.

Cisco and EMC want to sell a lot of hardware along the way, they will. But Virtualization software is not the answer and it won't be the solution that wins.

The results of the Cisco White Paper, 60 VMWARE VM's producing 5 IOPS with millions of dollars of hardware supporting them. Pathetic.

[RobertFHarwood]

I remember the Intel 860 processor, and I wrote software for it. It originally was going to be a part of combination of a 486 and 860. The 486 front ended the 860. Before Intel changed the licensing of the chip to only be used for graphics, it was 250 core RISC processor, asymmetric. Think what that processor would have evolved to today?

[winstein]

For us, the flexibility of virtualization out-weights its performance penalty.

Also about 20 years ago, an CRT engineer told me that the LCD uses are limited because it will never be as fast as the CRT's. Look at where we are today.