The Acadia joint venture oddly appended to the original VCE Coalition is gone, its integration functions transferred to VCE, the company. Acadia’s hallmark professional services seem to have disappeared entirely, gone to partners.

The restructuring is supposed to simplify the way the coalition does business but obviously the old structure didn’t work. The streamlined entity, still a work in progress, is supposed to correct its failing, shushing reseller complaints about Acadian competition and getting a fire lit under sales.

According to VCE chairman and CEO Michael Capellas, “As one entity under a single management structure, VCE can scale more rapidly to meet market demand while ensuring that our efforts are tightly aligned with the needs of our customers and partners.”

VCE reckons its total incremental market opportunity exceeds $100 billion and that its supply chain capacity can support a billion dollars in bookings. With a hundred customers, it’s believed to be operating under that potential.

Once the CEO of Compaq before he sold it to HP, Capellas was originally brought in as CEO of Acadia Enterprises LLC and chairman of the VCE Coalition.

Presumably the old ownership arrangements maintain. The Acadia joint venture was between Cisco and EMC with VMware and Intel as minority investors.

VCE will now do all product development, integration, pre-sales and support. It will move Acadia’s pre-configured Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, concocted out of Cisco’s Intel-based servers and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware virtualization, through the 120 resellers the coalition has reportedly assembled and apparently through the Cisco, EMC and VMware sales machines. It will need to wrestle with the implicit channel conflicts.

Acadia was supposed to build, operate and transfer Vblock infrastructure to customers, half of which were expected to be end users, half service providers.

VCE is reportedly abandoning the reference architectures Acadia started with for turnkey SKUs shipped fully configured from factories in Ireland and Massachusetts at fixed prices – not prices negotiated as you go with each of its three parents separately.

There’s now supposed to be an integrated two-year product roadmap and the ability to upgrade system components as they happen from each of the threesome – not way later – as well as code updates at fixed intervals.

Reseller can apparently expect third-party training programs and market development funds.

For its part, VCE has 500 people and is reportedly hiring. Its people are increasingly its own rather than on loan from its parents and it’s supposed to up the number of Centers of Excellence it has globally to show off the widgetry to tire-kicking prospects.

Netezza, it says, is dependent on proprietary hardware that impacts its I/O and puts it out-of-sync with the latest advances. Oracle, it goes on, with its historical scaling issues, is using relatively skimpy old-fashioned legacy SMP widgetry that’s better at OLTP than data warehousing and analytics, Greenplum’s strength. Exadata, it says, “breaks at more than eight racks” and Teradata, well, Teradata might be considered a rival but its price point is so over the moon it’s not really comparable.

Greenplum, which never did hardware before and always preached the software-only approach, is using standard x86 Intel boxes sourced from Dell with 10 gigE switches that expand to 16 servers in a rack for its new integrated massively parallel Data Computing Appliance.

It developed the thing during its short two-and-a-half months as an EMC property – now that it’s got EMC’s wherewithal to do it – and positions the box as “a key enabler of ‘big data’ clouds and self-service analytics.”

It also positions EMC as a server wannabe like Cisco, which also jumped its hereditary boundaries.

The parallel-everything widget uses Greenplum’s latest and greatest 4.0 Database and is supposed to process 10TB an hour, making it twice as fast as Exadata systems and five times fast as systems from Netezza and Teradata.

Greenplum claims its purpose-built parallel system can handle up to 5PB of “real” user data across a maximum 4,608 cores, offering up to three times more scalability and four times as many database cores than rival systems for the industry’s best price/performance ratio.

Since it’s supposed to deliver the industry’s fastest data loading and performance, more data can be analyzed faster and at lower cost and users should be able to make sense of the massive amounts of data they generate from various sources such as always-on networks, the web, consumers, surveillance systems and sensors more efficiently. It supports both large batch and continuous real-time loading.

Of course IDC predicts that data will grow 44-fold over the next decade.

Greenplum has integrated database, compute, storage and networking into the enterprise-class system and will sell it in half-rack, full-rack and multi-rack appliance configurations that scale to 24 racks. And being an EMC vassal, it’s integrated with EMC’s replication, backup, recovery and deduplication technologies.

EMC’s Data Domain acquisition (famously plucked out of NetApp’s hands) is supplying integrated backup and deduplication while EMC’s own CLARiiON-based CX4 960 machines – in their RecoverPoint disaster recovery avatar – will be offered alongside Greenplum’s appliance for site-to-site replication. That way the company can say no server-based resources are consumed for remote replication and failback operations.

Greenplum’s Postgres-based Database 4.0 is still available as a licensed software-only solution for deployment on industry-standard x86 hardware and integrated infrastructure solutions such as the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition Vblock infrastructure packages.

EMC, which claims the appliance will be a “key element of private clouds,” will supply consulting, migration, services and training for the anti-Oracle/anti-IBM push.

The appliance lists for a million dollars for an entry-level half-rack, which is good for 18TB uncompressed, 72TB compressed.

Greenplum pre-sold a few racks ahead of its announcement Wednesday including the New York Stock Exchange and was reportedly expecting to deliver a six-rack system this week.

Since becoming part of EMC 75 days ago, Greenplum says staffing has increased by 30% to 200 people. Apparently its field organization is increasing.

It does not bode well for clouds anywhere.

Atmos Online was its 14-month-old, potentially Amazon-challenging, multi-tenant/multi-petabyte storage-as-a-cloud service that was supposed to let people build their own on-premise cloud service or, complements of federation, leverage a public cloud to deliver content and information services to reduce costs.

EMC says on its web site – without saying why though – that the widgetry, which eBay used for its storage, will only be available from here on out – and who knows how long that is – as a development environment “to foster adoption of Atmos technology and Atmos cloud services offered by our continuously expanding range of Service Provider partners who offer production services.”

Paid subscriptions and support are gone. Ditto any SLAs.

EMC is telling customers to “migrate any critical data or production workloads currently served via Atmos Online to one of our partners offering Atmos-based services” and naming three: AT&T’s on-demand Synaptic Storage as a Service, Hosted Solutions’ Stratus Cloud Storage and Peer 1 Hosting’s CloudOne Storage. No mention of any help migrating though it claims in an e-mail that “We have worked with customers to make transitions as seamless and secure as possible.”

In fact, EMC is going to use the privately held Greenplum to start a new data computing products division under Greenplum CEO Bill Cook that is expected to make more acquisitions and add in-house developments. Cook, an ex-Sun exec, will report to Intel defector Pat Gelsinger, the prime mover behind the acquisition who’s now president of EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.

And to top it off they got former Sun chairman Scott McNealy, who sits on Greenplum’s advisory board – Sun used to sell Greenplum’s stuff – to bite the hand that wrote his Sun buy-out check – under the circumstances still a nice chunk of change – and wax eloquent in the EMC-Greenplum announcement about how “EMC’s strength in the enterprise and Greenplum’s push to fully transform data warehousing and business analytics, makes for a perfect fit” and how “together they are brilliantly bringing together the power of cloud computing, virtualization and social collaboration to help customers as they venture into the next phase of computing and business analytics.”

No Larry Ellison lapdog he. EMC says McNealy will remain an unpaid advisor.

Greenplum’s shared-nothing, massively parallel, scale-out technology has been used lately for self-service analytics and has recently been positioned as a key enabler of “big data” clouds – a word that’s not really in Larry’s lexicon.

Greenplum also happens to use a virtualized x86 infrastructure, a happy coincidence considering EMC also happens to own the lion’s share of VMware and happens to have its own virtualized private cloud infrastructure in Vblock, the pre-integrated concoction of Cisco networking, VMware virtualization and EMC storage.

Greenplum – which is based on a version of PostgreSQL its own mother wouldn’t recognize – is supposed to be capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional database software at a dramatically lower cost.

Data-driven outfits like Nasdaq OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media use it to try to make sense of the massive amount of data they’ve got and can only look forward to getting more of.

IDC predicts that over the next 10 years the amount of digital data created annually will grow 44 fold.

EMC is supposed open more doors for Greenplum. It means to continue to supply Greenplum’s product portfolio and plans to deliver new EMC reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software appliance designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.

EMC hasn’t said what it’s agreed to pay for Greenplum, other than that it’s paying cash. GigaOm says it heard from sources that EMC is paying upwards of $300 million. Greenplum raised $61 million in three rounds. The third round two-and-a-half years ago ironically included Sun and SAP Ventures. SAP, of course, in trying to close on its acquisition of Sybase.

Microsoft bought into Greenplum’s first round back in 2000.

Greenplum says it was in fund-raising mode six or eight weeks ago when the call from EMC came. EMC reportedly reviewed its other options but stuck with the devil it knew. The pair has been selling together for the last year.

Greenplum, on its own a software-only solution, will tell you that Oracle’s Exadata, whose pipeline Larry said last month is approaching $1 billion, is based on 20-year-old rack technology; Netezza is proprietary; Teradata wasn’t figured out analytics yet; and HP Neoview is a non-starter.

Greenplum, on the other hand, fits into Gelsinger’s overarching cloud-based vision of separating data from storage to create vPlex virtual storage and moving the data around the globe by building worldwide federated storage employing distributed cache coherency, resolving the twin problems of bandwidth and latency. Everyone everywhere basically gets immediate access and updates don’t send the master data into an out-of-sync befuddle.

The EMC-Greenplum deal should close this quarter. All of Greenplum’s 140 people will be going over.

See http://www.beyondvc.com/2010/07/emc-buys-portfolio-company-greenplum-more-behind-the-story.html to hear from one of Greenplum’s VCs.

Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow’s magnificent tear-jerker “Evangeline,” although Cisco’s new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

Anyway, Cisco, EMC and VMware – with at least the encouragement of their silent partner Intel – have also formed what they call the Virtual Computing Environment coalition to push on-premise and hosted private cloud computing created out of Cisco’s Intel Xeon-based Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware’s virtualization to large accounts and service providers through third parties.

The coalition, which will claim more of their resources, talent and investment than the joint venture, will consist of an ecosystem of VARs, service providers, channel partners and ISVs and to start includes the big system integrators Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro.

It’s supposed to advance Cisco’s fortunes in the data center against IBM and HP, both of which are ticked at Cisco’s temerity in daring to try to break into servers – and neither is likely to be any happier with this alliance. Their only consolation may be that Cisco’s boxes haven’t gotten a ringing endorsement from users – at least not yet.

What they might like even less, however, is EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s contention that no one company can deliver everything that’s needed in this leg of technology and that he and his mates have a major leg up on the kind of collegiality that will be needed going forward, the kind of partnership that – according to Cisco CEO John Chambers – “will change the data center and the cloud forever.”

The three companies are going to be pooling their roadmaps and sharing and relinquishing control of their most sacred customer information to each other. And Chambers said the “leap of faith” involved in such a situation “begins at the top,” adding “I trust Joe with my life.” Chambers, by the way, once worked for Tucci and their relationship goes back decades.

McKinsey estimates that the market they’re shooting for will be worth $85 billion by 2015, or 20% of worldwide spending on data center infrastructure and services.

Acadia is characterized as an accelerator for users that want to get out of the blocks fast. It and the coalition are going to peddle and support what are called Vblock infrastructure packages – integrated, tested, validated, ready-to-grow configurations of the quartet’s virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies.

The companies say that early Vblock customer trials have delivered up to 40% reductions in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures, a major come-on.

The first kits out the door this quarter from third parties include a mid-range Vblock 1 and a high-end Vblock 2. An entry-level Vblock 0 is due next year.

Vblock 2 supports 3,000-6,000 virtual machines and is built out of Cisco’s UCS boxes and Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS); EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage and RSA security; and VMware’s vSphere platform.

Vblock 1 supports 800-3,000 virtual machines and uses EMC’s CLARiiON storage.

Vblock 0, when it gets here, will support 300-800 virtual machines and use EMC’s Unified Storage. It will target medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations and be used for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs and customers.

Pricing on Vblock, which won’t brook any substitutions of outside hardware or software, is hard to pin down because each account will be different but will range from hundreds of thousands to many millions of dollars.

The companies said the widgetry can scale with additional computer and storage claiming that’s a key differentiator compared to other people’s monolithic systems.

Their calling card will be virtualization because it’s the hinge on which the whole door swings. VMware CEO Paul Maritz says that the triumvirate is also working to ensure that users can get out of the cloud as well as into it. It’s not meant to be, as the song says, the Hotel California from which there is no escape.

EMC has also come up with Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager for Vblock, which is designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles. EMC’s RSA security is layered on the Vblock architecture for policy management of identity, data and infrastructure but doesn’t mean the customer has to reduce the security software it already has in place.

The companies mean to bring out other Vblock packages including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Chambers said the companies are working on “seven or eight things,” but identified none of them.

Besides pre-sales, the coalition will hawk a bunch of professional services including a Cloud-based Business Advisory Service, Private Cloud Strategic Impact Advisory Service, Private Cloud Architecture Impact Advisory Service, Virtual Desktop Advisory Service, Cloud Computing Strategy Service, and Vblock Design and Implementation Service.

Acadia, meanwhile, is supposed to build, initially operate and ultimately transfer Vblock infrastructure to the customers, half of which are likely to be end users and half service providers.

The engagements – and they’re only talking about a “modest number” of accounts that want to get up fast – should run from 18 months to three years. The companies see Acadia as something of a knowledge repository, heavy on white papers, and training. There will be problem re-creation labs. It should begin customer operations in Q1. It reportedly has no signed contracts yet.

The infrastructure-as-a-service Acadia venture will have its own CEO but the companies haven’t picked him yet. They’re recruiting. Otherwise Acadia will consist of 130 people described as the trio’s “top talent.”

The companies aren’t explaining how much was or will be invested in the venture or by whom only that EMC and Cisco are the principals.

The coalition’s management is more amorphous. Supposedly the three CEOs are running it; more practically they’ve delegated their senior lieutenants to see it thrives day-to-day, folks like Howard Elias and Pat Gelsinger and in turn Dennis Hoffman at EMC, Gary Moore and Rob Lloyd and in turn Manjula Talreja at Cisco and Brian Byun at VMware. This bears watching to see how it shakes out since there’s no real quarterback.

Where EMC’s Atmos cloud widgetry may or may not fit in the grand scheme of things is unclear.

Based on broad hints from the companies, which were already joined at the hip, the Wall Street Journal got wind of the joint venture in September and said it was code named Alpine. They’ve reportedly been working on it for the last three-and-a-half years, intently the last six months.

The deduplication house will go to EMC for $33.50 a share in cash. EMC raised its bid from $30 Monday, as determined to get Data Domain as it was to keep it away from rival NetApp.

NetApp had started at $25 a share in cash and stock a few weeks ago and thought it had the deal sewed up until EMC crashed the party with a hostile $30 tender offer. NetApp went to $30 but in cash and stock; it couldn’t match EMC cash offer. When EMC went to $33.50, it was simply outmatched.

A rueful NetApp CEO Dan Warmenhoven said in a statement, “NetApp applies a disciplined approach to acquisitions, one focused intently on creating long-term value for our stockholders. We therefore cannot justify engaging in an increasingly expensive and dilutive bidding war that would diminish the deal’s strategic and financial benefits.”

At $33.50 a share, EMC’s offer is 419 times Data Domain’s consensus earnings this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. Excluding options it’s still a multiple of 86.

Data Domain, which had accepted both of NetApp’s offers over EMC’s, has agreed to the acquisition and has reportedly already sent NetApp a $57 million check to cover the breakup fee.

EMC will be paying a total of $2.1 billion, net of Data Domain’s cash, making it one of its priciest acquisitions. EMC paid $2.1 billion for RSA Security in 2006, the most it’s ever paid for a property.

EMC expects the acquisition to be neutral to its non-GAAP earnings per share in fiscal 2009 and accretive in fiscal 2010.

The deal should close by the end of the month.

NetApp throwing in the towel so soon surprised the Wall Street punters who bid Data Domain’s stock up over $34, a fact one of its largest investors reportedly took advantage of.

EMC has clipped the wings of the erstwhile president of its storage division David Donatelli, who suddenly resigned last Monday and tried to flit to rival HP to run its storage, servers and networking.

EMC sued to enforce his one-year non-compete and got the preliminary injunction it asked for stopping him from starting his new job on Tuesday May 5 as scheduled.

Donatelli sued first asking a California court to scrap his non-compete; HP’s headquartered in California where they don’t much care for non-competes but the Massachusetts court where EMC sought succor decided late Monday that “Donatelli’s intention to work for HP in California, which has a statutory prohibition on covenants not to compete, does not warrant denial of EMC’s request for injunctive relief.”

The court’s order said, “The court concludes that the covenant which Donatelli signed is an enforceable contract, is not unreasonably broad (at least on its face) and serves legitimate business interests of EMC.”

The next move appears to be a hearing. If history is any guide EMC, which probably feels stabbed in the back, is not going to be very negotiable. After 22 years with the company and talk of being EMC’s next CEO, Donatelli knows all its secrets.

Starting May 5 Donatelli, who was with EMC for 22 years and so knows all its secrets, is supposed to replace retiring HP exec Scott Stallard.

At least he is if he can clear the legal hurdles.

EMC sued Donatelli in Massachusetts to enforce his non-compete after Donatelli sued EMC in California, where HP lives, to get out from under the non-compete, according to Reuters.

Massachusetts, where EMC lives, respects non-competes. California doesn’t.

EMC has some practice at this sort of thing. In 2001 it sued Doran Kempel, who was general manager of its Media Solutions Group, when he tried to go off and become CEO of a nearby little start-up called SANgate Systems that was doing storage management software. EMC won and kept Kempel out of work for over a year.

More recently New York-based IBM delayed its chip guru Mark Papermaster in taking a top job at California-based Apple for six months. It fact he’s just started.

Presumably HP saw this coming.

Anyway, Cisco, EMC’s new best friend, obviously has interests in the Donatelli case. When HP flourished its prize it talked about “converged platforms of servers, storage and networking,” making the move sound like a clear offense against Cisco.

EMC and its baby VMware are closely allied with Cisco in its industry-upsetting Unified Computing plunge into servers.

HP is number two in the global server market behind IBM and the unit Donatelli is supposed to run is a few billion dollars bigger than the one he just left. It’s also got a Cisco-like Matrix blade server for virtualized data centers to do battle with the server upstart and its friends, not to mention its storage interests.

EMC’s immediate response to Donatelli’s treasonous resignation Monday indicated its surprise. For all its talk about its deep bench, it installed EVP Frank Hauck in Donatelli’s empty chair on an interim basis. He will keep running global marketing and customer quality, leaving question marks over who will wind up running the division.

Although EMC last week said its first-quarter earnings were down 20% to $205.3 million on revenues down 9.2% to $3.15 billion, CEO Joe Tucci, borrowing Intel CEO Paul Otellini’s hymnal, called a bottom, saying he expected spending to pick up in the back end of the second half.

He still expects the recession to shave 10% off spending this year. Donatelli was one of the senior managers at EMC to take a 10% pay cut this year.

There’s talk that successor planning at EMC – or lack of it – had something to do with Donatelli’s departure. At HP he is supposed to report to Ann Livermore, executive vice-president of HP’s Technology Solutions Group. ProCurve general manager Marius Haas would report to Donatelli.