The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition has signed up its first Asian operator customer — Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) — ten months after the partnership was created to offer packages of hardware and software for data centers, it said this week.
The VCE coalition was announced in November 2009 and is comprised of three partners: Cisco, which provides networking equipment and servers; storage provider EMC; and VMware, which provides virtualization software. They combined their products into bundles, called Vblocks, that are designed to handle different types of data-center workloads. They basic idea is that companies can easily build and scale up their data centers for cloud-computing applications by putting these Vblocks together.
SingTel is the first Asian operator to announce plans to use VCE’s products. It will use the VCE products to offer hosted computing services to corporate customers. The services will be rolled out before the end of the year.
Systems integration work for the new SingTel services will be provided by the VCE coalition partners. A services joint venture, Acadia, established by EMC and Cisco to handle systems integration work using Vblocks, is not yet operational in Asia.