Cisco, EMC and VMware, the trifecta of companies putting their own proprietary stamp on cloud computing for the enterprise, today created a partnership to offer equipment called Vblocks and support a new joint venture called Acadia that will help business customers and service providers build out clouds based on the Vblock gear packages. The partnership can be read as an attack on hardware providers building gear for the clouds and a potential threat to cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s cloud services that aren’t building VMware clouds.

Vblocks combine the server, storage and OS together in different pre-configured variations (from 300 to 6,000 virtual machines) so customers can buy them and easily launch their own private clouds. It’s similar to the specialized hardware offered by IBM under its CloudBurst name and gear from HP. The CisEMware partnership could sell Vblocks to cloud providers such as Savvis and Terremark which are currently building enterprise clouds based on software and gear from the coalition members. The Acadia joint venture