Tectonic plates shifting with EMC's upcoming news?

EMC is building hype around a worldwide announcement it plans to make April 14 that will involve multiple vendor partners. Anticipation is running high that the news will be around offering enterprises on-site cloud computing through a partnership with Cisco and the use of VMware's hypervisor.

It's no secret that VMware will be announcing the next version of its hyperviser soon and that it will be significantly about the cloud, existing partly inside the telecom service provider and partly inside the data center. EMC wants to tie into the data center part of that.

EMC has the storage, VMware has the hypervisor and Cisco with its recent California unified computing announcement, has the servers.

By offering an internal cloud that is also aware of an external cloud, a federated system is created where data can be stored and accessed locally and remotely and costs can be dramatically reduced in that data does not need to reside on systems specific to the applications -- not unlike Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service.

Being able to deliver a cloud infrastructure to enterprises will not be about offering a new data center architectural model, but more about a way to deliver IT services inexpensively and with greater management flexibility, one industry observer said.