Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware make alliance official

November 2009

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware announced Tuesday, November 24, that 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.