emc

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware announced Tuesday a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product.

The venture will sell and provide maintenance and service support for the product, which is called V-Block. It will combine EMC's storage equipment, Cisco's virtualized servers and networking equipment, and VMware's virtualization technology.

The deal had been rumored since September, when the Wall Street Journal reported the companies were working on a collaborative effort code-named Alpine. Talk of the deal heated up late last week and early this week.

The joint venture will market and provide maintenance for the … Read more

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware are expected to announce this week a new joint venture to sell data center products and services using virtualization technology, according to report in the Wall Street Journal.

The new products called "V-Block" combine EMC's storage equipment with Cisco's new virtualized services and networking equipment along with VMware's virtualization technology.

In September, The Wall Street Journal reported that Cisco and EMC were in talks to form a new services venture code-named Alpine. V-Block may be this same service.

The products will either be sold as an end-to-end solution that companies … Read more

Given that the phrase "our current economy" has such a negative connotation, EMC's third-quarter earnings report last week was downright upbeat.

EMC surpassed its own optimistic guidance for the fiscal quarter just ended by 4 percent. Wow. Other phrases like "increasing confidence among customer in spending their IT budgets" and "very weak first quarter progressing to more normal third and fourth quarters (of 2009)" were heard on the conference call with analysts. Cool. Happy days are here again for the storage industry, right? Well, it depends.

EMC is still regarded as a bellwether … Read more

EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci said Thursday that customers are "signaling more comfort spending their IT budgets." The company reported better-than-expected third-quarter results.

The storage giant reported earnings of $298.2 million, or 14 cents a share, down 24 percent from the same period a year ago. Revenue was $3.52 billion, down 5 percent from a year ago. Under a non-GAAP basis, EMC reported earnings of $480.3 million, or 23 cents a share, 2 cents better than Wall Street estimates.

Generally speaking, EMC has been well-positioned in the downturn because of a focus on storage, cloud … Read more

The debate over single-function server appliances versus general-purpose servers is a long-standing one.

Appliances first came onto the scene in the late 1990s during the first Internet boom. They focused on a particular task, such as Web serving, and were designed to be ready to install with minimum muss, fuss, or skill. This assembly line approach to server farms was to be the secret sauce that made possible infinite growth without infinite IT staff.

Cobalt Networks was perhaps the best known and most sophisticated of the companies to offer appliances. Sun Microsystems later acquired Cobalt and then failed to successfully … Read more

Earlier this week, EMC revealed that it has attracted longtime Intel executive Pat Gelsinger to run its storage business.

Gelsinger is set to become president and chief operating officer of EMC's Information Infrastructure Products (virtually all in EMC's product group except VMware), including the Enterprise Storage Division, RSA Information Security, Content Management and Archiving, and Ionix IT Management. His direct reports will be Frank Hauck, who now leads ESD, Mark Lewis of CMA, Art Coviello of RSA, and Jay Mastaj of Ionix.

A Wall Street Journal blog post quotes Gelsinger as ultimately wanting to be Intel's president, … Read more

Intel has reorganized its upper management, and one executive, Pat Gelsinger, is taking a new high-profile role at storage and software company EMC, the companies announced Monday.

Gelsinger, 48, had been a major figure at Intel, where he worked for 30 years. Among his roles: chief architect of a flagship chip from the 1990s, the 486 that followed the 386 and preceded the Pentium; the company's first chief technology officer; and most recently co-general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, which brought in more than half of the chipmaker's revenue selling chips for servers and business PCs.

At … Read more

Networking giant Cisco Systems and storage area networking company EMC may be teaming up to form a new joint venture to provide technology services to big companies, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Citing unnamed sources who have been briefed on the plans, the Journal story said the new joint venture, code-named Alpine, would target large businesses and would focus on installing Cisco server and networking gear and EMC storage equipment into data centers.

It's unclear when the joint venture might be announced, according to the newspaper. So far, Cisco has declined to comment on the speculation. And an … Read more

Owners of Time Machine-enabled Macs need not apply. But for the rest--especially small businesses that want a centralized backup solution, then EMC has something for you.

The company announced Tuesday the availability of its Retrospect 8.1 backup software for the Mac platform, which, unlike the previous version 8.0, now also supports the the legacy PowerPC Macs. This is good news for businesses that still have the older Mac computers.

According to EMC, on average, users of Retrospect 8.1 on Intel-based Macs can expect local backup performance to increase from 10 percent to 15 percent over version 8.… Read more