Curtin University of Technology in Australia will become one of the first clients to deploy Vblock, the full-package virtualized IT stack offered jointly by Cisco, EMC and VMware. Cisco announced the Vblock for the first time in November 2009. The school has already deployed technology from all three vendors and, according to a Cisco spokeswoman, intends "to move to a Vblock architecture in the future."

Since the Vblock announcement, Cisco and VMware have made a similar agreement with one of EMC's major competitors NetApp. Both Vblock and Cisco's package with NetApp will compete with a virtualized full-stack offering from HP and Microsoft that consists of the two companies'products, announced last month.

"This coalition is about more than technology and partnership,"Cisco CEO John Chambers said about the alliance with EMC and VMware in a November 2009 statement.

"It is about an entirely new and unique approach to the data center that improves utilization, power consumption and security of information, all in a way that lowers the total cost to the customer, not via a box, but with a network-based architectural approach for optimizing virtual resources."

Cisco stepped into the server market with the announcement of its Unified Computing System in March of 2009

Vblock consists of Cisco's Unified Computing System, EMC storage arrays and VMware's virtualization technology. EMC holds 80 percent of VMware shares. Cisco said the solution would come in three different versions: 3,000-6,000 virtual machines, 800-3,000 VM's and 300-800 VM's.