Both companies represent what the Taneja Group calls hyper-convergence. In fact that's what the HC stands for in Scales's HC3 product name, Monroe Kroft says. "They've morphed the lines between compute, storage, networking and data protection," says Arun Taneja, founder of the group.

These devices give a virtual machine-centric view of storage and networking, and present VM admins with an interface that executes infrastructure changes based on virtual machine requirements, he says.

This can present a danger to businesses in that granting this broad authorization to VM admins can become a risk, says Eric Chiu, president of HyTrust, which is making its own announcement at VMworld. "With networking and storage collapsed to one storage layer, it gives lots of power to one administrator," Chiu says. "That means that admin could potentially destroy or have great ramifications on security."

His company is announcing HyTrust 3.0 which adds the ability to require that two authorized staff approve infrastructure changes that could significantly impact operations. When one person wanted to make such a change, he or she would have to get someone from an approvers list to go along with it, he says.

HyTrust 3.0 also supports VCE's Vblock storage bundle. It will integrate with the Cisco and VMware components right away, and integration with the EMC parts will come sometime next year, Chiu says.