Meanwhile, the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant broadened its data center channel offerings, adding all data center products to its Value Incentive Program (VIP), launching a Data Center Channel Solutions Program and creating an Authorized Partner Program (APP) to bring the new rack-mount server offerings to market.

The new products and programs, unveiled Wednesday at the Cisco Partner Summit, are designed to give partners a piece of the $20 billion server pie as the market opportunity continues to grow, said Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior.

"Data center and virtualization are a key market transition we believe will result in a lot of growth for Cisco and our partner community," she said.

The addition of the UCS C-Series rack-mount servers to Cisco's data center strategy, which has seen the launch of a total of six products in the past 18 months, broadens the reach of its UCS, offering an entry point to the architecture while providing an upgrade path to full UCS attributes. UCS, which was launched in March, is Cisco's next-generation data center architecture that combines servers, storage access, virtualization and the network into a single fabric managed by one system.

Soni Jiandani, Cisco's vice president of marketing for its server access virtualization business group, said the C-Series rack-mount servers give partners an alternative offering to the B-Series blade servers available in UCS.

"This lets channel partners reach out to a larger marketplace," she said. The C-Series includes three models: the 1U UCS C200, the 2U C210 and the memory-intensive 2U C250, which will be available in the fourth quarter of calendar 2009.

Jiandani said the C-Series servers offer access to the unified fabric through a low-latency lossless 10 Gbps Ethernet foundation while Cisco's memory extension technology yields more than 2.5 times the addressable memory of the two-socket rack-mount platform, which can provide support for more virtual machines per server and deliver the scalability to run large, memory-intensive applications.

In addition, the Cisco virtualized adapter provides adapter consolidation and virtualization optimization by enabling each virtualized adapter to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections.

Jiandani said the new servers, which are based on Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, can be integrated into existing architectures or deployed fully integrated with UCS Manager.

"The C-Series is a powerful choice for customers," said Bob Olwig, vice president at St. Louis-based solution provider Worldwide Technology. "We have customers that span different markets. The C-Series provides a lower entry point to get on board with the compute architecture."

Olwig added that giving customers a choice between blade servers and rack-mount servers for UCS is a differentiator for Cisco and will enable VARs to help their customers determine their next-generation data center paths.

"Customers want choice," he said. "This is a powerful choice for them in the market."

Cisco was quick to point out that it isn't looking to force partners away from their incumbent rack-mount server vendors. Instead, it said it is positioning the C-Series as a component of the full UCS architecture, not a stand-alone.

"This is not a server-server discussion," said John Growdin, Cisco's worldwide channels director of go-to-market for data center products, adding that 72 percent of Cisco's Data Center Network Infrastructure (DCNI) specialized partners sell other vendors' servers. "We're not going after that entire pie."

Partners agreed.

"I don't see this replacing [our existing server offerings], I see it complementing. Customers are going to have choice," said Kurt MacDonald, vice president of network services at Long View Systems, a Calgary-based solution provider. MacDonald said Long View is also an HP partner.

Next: New Channel Programs Target Data Center To help partners sell next-generation data centers, Cisco also launched a set of channel programs to bulk up its data center channel.

First, Cisco said it is opening up unified computing to a broader range of partners with APP to support the new C-Series rack-mount servers. Growdin said all DCNI specialized partners will be able to sell the new rack-mount servers after completing online training and an exam.

Growdin said Cisco also expanded VIP to include all of its data center technologies, including UCS, storage, networking and WAN optimization products. Adding the data center products to VIP will motivate partners to invest in building a unified data center practice as opposed to having separate practices around data center networking, storage and compute and virtualization.

MacDonald said Long View has been selling solutions into the data center for years, but in a more product-focused way. Now, Long View is looking to combine its product categories to launch a single unified data center practice.

"We're looking to bring our server, storage and network practices into one practice," he said.

Cisco also launched the Data Center Channel Solutions Program to boost the sale of tested, validated referencing IT solution designs that tie in products from Cisco's data center technology partners, such as EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, Red Hat and VMware.

Lastly, Cisco added new IT career certifications around data center management.

Cisco launched two new individual certifications for customers and partners with job roles such as data center architect, data center builder and data center technical operations professional. The two new certifications, Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Design Specialist and Cisco Data Center Unified Computing Support Specialist, build on foundational skills such as storage networking, data center networking, infrastructure, data center application services and virtualization. The certifications will validate the design and support expertise of partners and customers across multiple data center technologies that make up the unified computing architecture, said Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, general manager of Learning At Cisco.