EMC and VCE, a two-year-old joint venture between the storage vendor, Cisco and VMware announced the latest release of EMC’s Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Provisioning. The new software, version 3.0, plugs into vCloud Director and vCenter Server to boost the visibility and provisioning in Vblock.

Vblock is VCE’s cloud-in-a-box offering, which fuses together Cisco networking gear, EMC storage arrays and VMware virtualization software.

The first major highlight of the update is that UIM/P is integrated with VMware’s vCloud Director.

“UIM now takes steps to create a pool of resources and feed that into vCloud Director to begin running applications,” said Tom Hayes, senior manager of marketing for EMC Ionix in an interview to Computerworld. “Up until now we’d been integrating just with vCenter Server. We’ve taken that integration to the next level.”

Another new addition is a feature called “Elastic Provisioning,” which allows users to added and remove server, network and storage resources non-disruptively.  Deeper integration with vCenter also means that new nodes are automatically discovered.

In addition, Vblock provisioning is made even speedier, thanks to simultaneous provisioning.  This means that compute, storage and network resources can be added all at the same time using IUM/P 3.0, unlike the previous two versions.  According to EMC’s Hayes provisioning is up to 50 percent faster with the new release.

The launch of IUM/P 3.0 follows an update from another partnership EMC has worked to maintain.  As a part of a 2001 contract with Dell (which has been renewed several times ever since), the former put its brand name  on EMC storage hardware and sold it. This relationship became a bit shaky, however, after Dell started competing with its own storage solutions, and eventually released a statement saying it will not renew the partnership in 2013 when it’s set to expire.

EMC’s partnership with Dell is close to ending, but it seems that things are still solid with VCE.  Cisco is planning to remain involved, according to a recent SEC filing.