News

posted on 02 May 2008 08:29

IBM has set up an Enterprise Data Centre Alliance to promote inter-operability and open standards in the data centre - and sell more IBM products and services.

The EDCA is backed by Brocade, Eaton, Juniper and Emulex on the hardware side, and also Citrix, Novell, Redhat, Sun (Solaris) and VMware. It will try to collaborate with the SNIA and also the Green Grid, which is aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of data centres by reducing electricity wastage.

Marty Lans, Brocade's senior director for data centre marketing, said: "Brocade is a long term partner with IBM. We believe this new enterprise data center Alliance Program is a great opportunity to further our Data Center Fabric strategy to help IBM customers evolve their data centers. IBM's commitment to open standards and interoperability will be beneficial in supporting high levels of performance and end-to-end interoperability across the new enterprise data center ecosystem."

It's all about selling the Brocade DCF story for him.

The vendor benefits of belonging to the EDCA indicate that it is an IBM-led marketing alliance with standardisation pretensions. IBM states that the benefits include:-

- Increased exposure to clients through a new enterprise data center alliance portal,
- Access to potential joint go-to-market activities,
- Potential participation in joint-development projects,
- The ability to participate in IBM client events,
- Exposure to capabilities and opportunity for early interoperability development and tests.

Nothing very substantial here in terms of industry-wide open enterprise data centre standards. What will result will be road maps and solution templates based on the alliance members' products and services.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}