Networking hardware developer Cisco Systems (cisco.com) has recently partnered with virtualization software developer VMware (vmware.com) to integrate its Virtual Infrastructure 3 software with Cisco's VFrame data center virtualization appliance in an effort to expand its Data Center 3.0 vision, offering customers enhanced IT automation capabilities, including added VMware ESX Server capacity on demand, as well as orchestrated configuration of network services. Customers will also benefit from increased IT agility and flexibility, faster coordinated provisioning of storage and network resources and improved business continuance.

Data Center 3.0 is Cisco's next-generation data center virtualization strategy announced in July. It is designed to help customers better use data center resources, improve business continuance, optimize application performance and enhance data security through real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, said Cisco.