EMC announced expanded reseller partnerships with both Brocade and Cisco at the EMC World conference here in Boston today as the company fleshes out its portfolio of converged networking products and services.
EMC’s big pitch at this week’s EMC World conference has been the “Journey to the Private Cloud.” The company says those clouds will be formed by bringing Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics together to create the backbone of the virtualized data center.
To that end, EMC plans to build out its converged networking services, products and management tools over the next several months.
EMC plans to offer a portfolio of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) switching products from Brocade that support Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), as well as a new data center system comprised of EMC storage and certain members of Cisco’s Nexus Family of 10GbE FCoE/CEE switches.
Brocade and EMC announced another cloud-related deal last week (see “Brocade, EMC lay groundwork for private clouds”), under which the companies began offering a set of integrated switching and storage solutions aimed at building private clouds for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and Oracle Database 11g environments.
EMC plans to begin shipping its new lineup of converged switching products in the third quarter of this year.
On the services front, EMC is building out its FCoE-related services in support of advanced network-based technologies, like VMware VMotion and Microsoft LiveMigration.
The new offerings are said to include converged networking services for Ethernet environments, including network assessment, planning, design and implementation services, spanning a range of protocols, including FCoE, CEE, iSCSI and NAS.
The company also claims to have developed tools that help customers migrate existing storage network infrastructures to converged networks.
