Guest post by Adrian Simays, Director of Technical Enablement for Microsoft at EMC Corporation.

It's a great week in New Orleans....great food, awesome Jazz, funky hats...and a powerful partnership with Cisco.  And the week is getting even better....at Microsoft TechEd, EMC announced the latest VSPEX solutions for Microsoft.

So what is the big news?  We announced the expansion of the VSPEX portfolio to include support for Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013.  This announcement extends the VSPEX support for SQL Server we announced at Microsoft Management Summit in April.  VSPEX provides infrastructure for customers looking to gain the benefits of converged infrastructures, leveraging EMC storage systems and next-generation backup products, while at the same time gaining more choice in individual stack components, including virtualization, server, and network technologies.  These VSPEX configurations enable customers to leverage the power of EMC with Cisco's UCS servers and industry leading networking to radically simplify private cloud deployments. Cisco UCS combines high-performance computing, networking, virtualization, and storage-access resources into a single unified system. This solution helps organizations quickly move toward a more cost-effective private cloud environment.

VSPEX helps customers address the challenges of managing IT infrastructure in a predictable, efficient manner.   Extending the VSPEX portfolio to applications such as Exchange and SharePoint enables our customers' to confidently consolidate, virtualize and manage these applications in a Private Cloud environment.  This is a particularly timely announcement as our customers are looking at various options as they consider upgrading to Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013.

You can also find more information on VSPEX here.

With these recent VSPEX announcements for Microsoft, it is important to put into perspective where these new VSPEX solutions fit into the overall EMC and Cisco partnership.

EMC and Cisco have been collaborating for years on bringing information infrastructure to customers that combines EMC's expertise in storing, protecting, and managing vast amounts of information with the power of Cisco's intelligent network. Cisco partners with EMC to deliver storage networking, disaster recovery, business continuity, data replication, virtualization, and information security solutions.  EMC and Cisco develop, test, and validate joint solutions that ensure interoperability and the highest levels of availability, performance, and cooperative support.   Together, Cisco and EMC are collaborating to offer customers a choice of industry-leading virtual infrastructure architectures that can simplify, automate, and transform your IT while helping you accelerate the journey to cloud computing.

With this rich history of collaboration, the future looks promising for more Cisco and EMC solutions that provide Three Paths to the Cloud on their journey to cloud computing.  We at EMC are also excited about our continued partnership with Cisco in the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program.  Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track is a reference architecture for building private clouds that combines Microsoft software, consolidated guidance, and validated configurations with EMC and Cisco  technologies-including compute, network, and storage-as well as value-added software components such as EMC FAST Suite as well as integration with  Microsoft System Center.

Are you at TechEd New Orleans?  You can see even more, please visit the EMC booth#1601 or the Cisco booth 1701.  If you are at TechEd you can get your own funky hat..