More fighting

In a direct challenge to computer giants IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., data storage firm EMC Corp. of Hopkinton has allied with Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s leading computer networking company.


In a joint venture, EMC, its majority-owned subsidiary VMware Inc., and Cisco will sell prefabricated business computer systems. The new products will be built with computer servers from Cisco, data storage hardware and software from EMC, and server management software from VMware. “Wherever you touch any one of the three of us, we will look like one company,’’ said Cisco chief executive John Chambers.
Nov. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp. was sued by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and accused of threatening computer manufacturers and making billions of dollars in illegal payments to pressure them to use its chips.
Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, violated federal antitrust laws, the state said today in a complaint in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. The company got computer makers to agree to use its chips in exchange for the payments, disguised as “rebates,” and threatened and punished manufacturers that worked with Intel’s rivals, Cuomo said.

Hewlett-Packard has fired back at Cisco in the increasingly contentious race to field an overarching data-center strategy, which will enable enterprises to rein in the complexity of sprawling networks and rampant virtualization.
Earlier this week, Cisco linked up with EMC and VMware in a partnership which tightly integrates storage alongside easy-to-manage virtualized data-center bundles called V-Blocks.
On Wednesday, HP unleashed its response. The computing powerhouse announced a converged infrastructure architecture, which essentially creates a one-stop data-center shop. It packages HP's compute, storage, networking offerings into a highly virtualized bundle which can be centrally managed. The server components are HP's BladeSystems.