Cisco/EMC cloud packages proprietary, but may not cause lock-in

Description

But while the Cisco/EMC venture may seem to introduce a potential for vendor lock-in, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

Several internal cloud vendors have argued that the key to building private clouds is the aggregation of many types of technologies from rival vendors into a centrally managed computing pool, and have built software to achieve that. While the Cisco/EMC cloud package consists of the two companies' proprietary systems, it could still be integrated into existing private cloud networks, industry observers say.

Cisco and EMC on Tuesday unveiled Vblock Infrastructure packages, containing hardware from Cisco and EMC and virtualization software from the EMC-owned VMware. The configurations will support thousands of virtual machines and the companies are marketing them as ready-made private clouds.

That's a significantly different approach than the one taken by vendors such as Platform Computing and Eucalyptus Systems , which have each developed software packages that take a customer's existing equipment, regardless of vendor, and aggregate them into large resource pools.

Platform's ISF software, for example, aggregates servers, storage, networking tools and hypervisors to create a shared pool of physical and virtual resources. Those pools could potentially include the Vblock Infrastructure packages developed by Cisco and EMC, ...

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