Networking VARs Prep For Data Center Blitz

Page 1 of 3

Traditional networking vendors are making no bones about it: They want a major stake in the data center, and they plan to take it.

Over the past few months, key networking vendors including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard's ProCurve Networking by HP and Juniper Networks have rolled out data center-focused products, looking to capture a piece of a lucrative market that by many accounts measures $14 billion in data center hardware and services sales.

While the data center game won't appeal to the bulk of traditional networking solution providers, those that are willing and able to move upstream will find significant opportunities to build solutions that help tie networking in with storage, virtualization and other hot data center technologies.

Quick Clicks: Vendors Roll Out Data Center Gear

"Everybody's validating that the data center right now is what's driving businesses," said John Ross, vice president of solutions architecture for solution provider GreenPages. "It's not about selling more ports anymore. The data center is finally becoming what we wanted it to be."

And what VARs want that data center to be, Ross said, is a central location for hosting applications, distributing workload and pushing data, all while leveraging an intelligent network to run systems.

John DeRocker, vice president of sales and vendor management for solution provider Nexus Information Systems, said VARs had better take notice of the burgeoning opportunity, as many potential customers are earmarking budget for building out data centers at the expense of other IT purchases.

"More money is being spent in the data center, not outside of the data center," DeRocker said, adding that roughly 50 percent of his company's business is data center-related. "If you don't take the data center down, you're going to lose in 2009. You have to own the data center. All budgets are being pushed into the data center. That's where the money is."

Traditional networking vendors are pushing in the data center direction and plan to bring some of their top-level VARs along for the ride.

No networking player has been more vocal about its data center ambitions than Cisco, which over the past two years has evolved its Data Center 3.0 vision into a solid roster of data center-ready products that may, in the very near future, even spawn a blade server offering. The first real fruit of Data Center 3.0 is the Nexus line of data center networking switches that debuted in January 2008, a high-powered family of boxes that fuel consolidation and virtualization of centralized server, storage and network resources.

And just this week, Cisco added three new data center switches to its Nexus line, hitting both the high end and low end of the data center switching spectrum with an 18-slot chassis, the Nexus 7018, and a smaller 1U model with the Nexus 5010.

Next: Juniper And ProCurve Get In On The Action

1 | 2 | 3 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More Networking