EMC is pushing heavily into the private cloud sphere as it gathered for its EMC World conference in Boston, in its home state of Massachusetts.

The firm said it was focusing on key data center challenges around network sprawl, compleixity and spiralling power and cooling costs in the context of private cloud investments.

See story: IDC: Server sales for private clouds to reach $12bn by 2012.

On the converged network front the firm said organizations are looking to replace multiple separate networks with converged networks, single network infrastructures designed specifically for the needs of virtualized storage and server environments as it announced new products from Brocade and an extended deal with Cisco.

Over the next seven months it said it would introduce
┬À An expanded portfolio of converged networking services for Ethernet environments, including network assessment, planning, design and implementation services, supporting a range of protocols - including Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), iSCSI and Network Attached Storage.

┬À An enhanced suite of tools to assist with the sizing, analysis, design and migration to converged networks.

┬À New Ethernet competencies for EMC Technology Solutions and Services personnel worldwide to better educate customers and deliver Ethernet-based networking and storage solutions.

┬À A full range of Brocade 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch products.
┬À A data center system solution offering consisting of select Cisco Nexus 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch products.

The products push would be backed by new services.

Charles King, principal analyst, of Pund-IT, Inc. said, "With enterprises leveraging virtualization more and more in their data centers, a new breed of robust network connectivity is becoming necessary.

As a result, customers will look to those vendors who can put together packages that advance new IT strategies while also leveraging existing data center investments.

EMC's proven expertise and capabilities in delivering strategy, planning, implementation and management of end-to-end solutions for virtualized environments will help new and existing customers successfully move to the cloud."

These solutions allow customers to architect a dynamic data center, respond to constantly changing business priorities, support advanced network-based technologies, like VMware VMotion and Microsoft LiveMigration, and guarantee application performance and availability.

In addition, EMC has developed advanced tools to help customers migrate their existing storage network infrastructure to a converged network, as well as size their environments to support replication and backup activities.

Edison Peres, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Partner Organization, Cisco, said: "Cisco and EMC share a common vision to accelerate data center virtualization and the transition to private cloud infrastructures.

Creating an integrated EMC and Cisco Nexus Switch offering will deliver a unique solution and enhanced value to customers in their journey toward private clouds."

Separately EMC formed a Technical Advisory Board to review EMC's technology and strategic efforts to migrate firms to private clouds.

Members include: Randolph Cowen, EMC board member and former CIO Goldman Sachs; Ian foster, Professor and Director Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory; Pat Gelsinger, president and COO Information Infrastructure Products, EMC; Joseph M Hellerstein Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkley; Steve Herrod, CTO VP of R&D VMware; Ronald L Rivest, Viterbi Professor of Computer Science MIT EECS department.

A video of CEO Joe Tucci's opening presentation can be found here: The Private Cloud