Cisco, EMC and VMware expanded their partnership with the formation of the Virtual Computing Environment coalition. It's a move that elevates Cisco to the level of data center powerhouses like of HP and IBM. According to ChannelWeb, the trio will leverage the storage, security and virtualization capabilities of EMC and VMware to propel Cisco's Unified Computing System into a solution set from all three companies.

The first offering from the Virtual Computing Environment coalition is the Vblock Infrastructure Package, which will offer pre-configured server, storage and virtualization management tools in a private cloud infrastructure. As Michael Hickins elaborates on our CTO Edge site, there will be three flavors of Vblock. Two will be available at launch, with the third to follow shortly thereafter.