LOS ANGELES, April 30 -- IBM today announced it is creating an alliance program for independent hardware and software vendors to support industry standards for new enterprise datacenters, which are dramatically more energy efficient, virtualized, and resilient.

The new alliance with top IT companies around the world will enable clients to evolve to new enterprise datacenters while offering the widest possible choice of open technologies.

The importance of interoperability and open standards for new enterprise datacenters -- including those for energy management, virtualization, networking, security and service management, among others -- is a focal point of this program.

For example, vendors that support energy efficiency standards can enable end-to-end management and monitoring of power and cooling of hardware in the datacenter. Such standards pave the way to product interoperability for greater datacenter efficiency by setting caps on energy use, shifting resources to meet business requirements, or adjusting workloads to avoid higher billing rates.

The alliance is targeted at independent hardware and software vendors that specialize in elements crucial to datacenters, including networking, virtualization, facilities management, platforms, operating systems, storage and systems management.

The alliance will offer several benefits to vendors that join including: Increased exposure to clients through a new enterprise datacenter alliance portal; access to potential joint go-to-market activities; potential participation in joint-development projects; the ability to participate in IBM client events; and exposure to capabilities and opportunity for early interoperability development and tests.

The following IT vendors are in support of this program: Brocade, Citrix, Eaton, Emulex, Juniper Networks, Novell, RedHat, Sun and VMware.

For additional information, visit www.ibm.com/datacenter.

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Source: IBM