Cisco Debuts Rack Servers, Broadens Data Center Channel

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