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Cisco and EMC allegedly sitting in tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G

VMWorld speculates on possible joint venture

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in Enterprise, 26th August 2009 12:31 GMT

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Rumours in the lead up to VMworld 2009 next week are suggesting that Cisco and EMC have formed a joint venture company, to market a jointly-developed product.

According to a person somewhat familiar with the situation, the JV company is hiring sales reps to sell the product.

This is not the 3-way Cisco-EMC-VMware deal revealed at the EMC forum on August 6. That involved the trio building an integrated virtual data centre, a sort of stack-in-a-rack, including (server) virtualisation, networking, security, storage and deduplication. Customers would treat this as a single component and obtain service from a single support centre. The offering might include Cisco's UCS servers or it might be available for vanilla x86 servers. The EMC Forum announcement did not clarify this.

EMC Competitor NetApp yesterday announced a somewhat comparable dynamic data centre offering.

The Cisco-EMC JV doesn't include VMware and, given the server interests of Cisco and the storage and cloud interests of EMC, it could be a combined UCS server/EMC storage offering or it might be a UCS server integrated into a possible Atmos compute offering, stories of which have also recently emerged.

It does seem that EMC may be anxious to become a bigger player in the server world and may be using its Cisco relationship to strengthen its offerings in competition with server giants Dell, HP and IBM.

A different rumour has suggested that EMC could be looking to acquire data indexer Kazeon. EMC wasn't immediately able to comment on these rumours, and Cisco said it doesn't comment on rumour and speculation. ®

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