The VAR Guy has spent a few days digesting recent developments from Cisco, EMC and VMware. The trio, as you may have heard, have teamed up and unleashed a cloud effort dubbed “Vblock.” Hmmm. What are the implications for channel partners? Take a look.

The trio claims 20% of $350 billion spent worldwide on data center technology infrastructure can be saved when switching to privatized cloud infrastructures. That’s a pretty bold claim. But the data points don’t end there.

Cisco, EMC and VMware claim 70% of those costs are actually spent maintaining existing “monolithic” infrastructures, leaving only 30% to new technology investments for a business.

Translation: We’re all spending too much on maintenance and too little on innovation. In a bid to correct that challenge, Cisco, EMC and VMware launched Vblock — a private cloud environment that claims to be built to scale easily.

Hybrid Technology

The technology is built around Cisco’s networking expertise, EMC’s storage solutions and VMware’s virtualization work — but the cloud system will be managed and maintained by all three companies.

VBlock comes in three flavors:

All of those also come with varying degrees of mid-to-enterprise storage, network and virtualization solutions from the respective companies as well.

Vblock O won’t be hitting the shelves until 2010, but it’s specifically aimed at the medium-sized business. The VAR Guy will be sure to keep his eyes on that effort, since there are clear implications for VARs.

More Lofty Claims

The press release shared this little tid-bit of information:

Again, bold and exciting claims. But still, The VAR Guy will draw his own conclusions once Vblock hits the mainstream.

No doubt, Cisco, EMC and VMware make for a powerful trio. The VAR Guy strongly believes in cloud computing but only time will tell if Vblock Infrastructure Packages become an industry ‘standard,’ especially since no single company has addressed a standard in a “Virtual Computing Environment.”

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