Investment bank Goldman Sachs recently surveyed 100 IT executives at Fortune 1000 companies and found that 18% plan to evaluate Cisco’s servers in the next year and about 67% expect to see an “increased presence for Cisco servers in their data centers over the next two to three years.  Several executives touted these findings during various keynote presentations at the partner summit.  However, GigaOm pointed out, an “increased presence” for Cisco servers doens’t mean much since Cisco’s servers are just now hitting the market. Since the vast majority of companies have no Cisco servers, just one Cisco server in a data center would represent an increased presence.

In any case, here’s a rundown of the channel-relevant news that came out this week around the Unified Computing system:

First Cisco announced several new programs aimed at expanding its data center partner channel.

• Cisco expanded its Value Incentive Program to all of its data center technologies. This program was limited to its data center switching line, but now partners earn incentive rewards for developing expertise around the company’s unified computing servers, storage networking, WAN optimization.
• Cisco also introduced its Data Center Channel Solutions Program. This appears to be a program that helps partners validate reference data center designs that incorporate products from leading data center vendors, such as EMC, Microsoft, Netapp, Red Hat and VMware. Note that leading server vendors like HP and IBM are not mentioned here. Old friends are now frenemies.
  
• The company also rolled out an Authorized Partner Program that expanded the number of channel partners that can sell Unified Computing servers. After completing some online training and an exam, all Cisco DCNI (Cisco Advanced Data Center Network Infrastructure Specialization) partners will be able to sell the newly announced UCS Series-C rack-mounted servers. (more on these new servers below).

In conjunction with all these channel programs, Cisco also announced an expansion of its Unified Computing System server family.  Cisco unveiled the UCS C-Series Rack-Mount servers, a new form factor for the UCS line (or an older form factor, depending on how you look at it).

Cisco’s initial roll-out of UCS involved the UCS B-Series blade servers, which work with specialized blade chassis, fabric interconnects and fabric extenders. The new C-Series rack servers will offer the following features:

• The servers will run on the unified, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric that eliminates the need for separate storage network connections in the servers.
• Like the B-Series servers, the C-Series will also have Cisco’s new memory extension technology, which Cisco claims will yield more than 2.5 times the addressable memory of currently available two-socket rack-mount platforms. this will allow companies to run more virtual machines on physical servers.
• Cisco will also include a virtualized adapter on these servers, which optimizes workload consolidation and virtualization by allowing each adaptor to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections inside the box.

These new servers are built on Intel Xeon 5500 processor. They will be available in the final quarter of 2009.

Cisco also announced two new IT career certifications in data center management, which it will target at both customers and channel partners.  the new certifications are Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Design Specialist and Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Support Specialist. Both certifications will involve skills in storage networking, data center networking infrastructure, data center applications services and virtualization.

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I also spoke with John Growdon, Director of Go-To-Market Worldwide Channels for Cisco, about the new certifications. Growdon explained how training people this way will help them work across traditional silos (in technology, company structure and sales structure) that must be broken down for virtualization technology to be implemented successfully. I’ll be posting the full Growdon Q&A soon on SearchNetworkingChannel.com.

]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/networking-channel-var/video-ciscos-new-data-center-virtualization-certifications/feed/ 0 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/networking-channel-var/video-padmasree-warrior-talks-data-center-partner-opportunities/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/networking-channel-var/video-padmasree-warrior-talks-data-center-partner-opportunities/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:10:19 +0000 AmyKucharik http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/networking-channel-var/?p=44 Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior addressed members of the press today at Cisco Partner Summit 2009, where she introduced some of Cisco’s data center opportunities for partners.

According to Warrior, Cisco has been hearing very positive feedback from its customers concerning the data center market. In a recent Goldman-Sachs survey of 100 IT executives from Fortune 1000 companies, 2/3 of those surveyed reported that they expected an increased presence of Cisco servers in their data centers over the next 2-3 years.

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In conjunction with this, Cisco will be announcing later today a new set of data center network channel programs, a set of new skill certifications for partners and an expansion to the UCS product line. I’ll keep an eye out for this and post more information about it later.