5 New Offerings From Cisco Partner Summit That Solution Providers Should Have On Their Radar

Cisco Partner Summit Debuts

Cisco released a variety of offerings for channel partners to sell at Cisco Partner Summit 2016 in San Francisco Tuesday, including a new storage-optimized UCS server and a revamped Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints security product.

More than 2,200 channel partners flocked to San Francisco this week to attend Cisco's second Partner Summit this year. The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant delivered some newsworthy moves around security, storage and new Cisco ONE software licenses programs available for partners.

CRN breaks down the new offerings that solution providers should have on their radar.

UCS S3260 S-Series

Cisco unveiled a storage-optimized server, the UCS S3260 S-Series, designed to address the needs of data-intensive workloads. The UCS S3260 is Cisco's first offering for its new S-Series aimed at delivering rapid scalability and cloud connectivity to help organizations handle the growth of unstructured data.

Based on Cisco's C3160 rack server, the S3260 has up to 600 TB of storage capacity, 90 TB of solid state drive flash, cache acceleration capabilities. It also provides scaling with Cisco's UCS Manager software and delivers unified input/output (I/O) connectivity for any type of storage.

The S3260 will become available for partners to sell starting Nov. 7.

AMP For Endpoints

Cisco launched a revamped Advanced Malware Protection for Endpoints offering that combines prevention, detection and response to simplify endpoint security delivered as a Software-as-a-Service.

Advancements to AMP for Endpoints include an antivirus engine, improved endpoint search, cognitive threat analytics and a new dashboard user interface. The offering enables organizations to prevent attacks by blocking malware at the point of entry while also eliminating the need for multiple redundant endpoint security technologies. Cisco said channel partners can use the offering to replace traditional anti-virus technology.

Cisco ONE Advanced Security

Cisco unveiled a new Cisco ONE Advanced Security program, an extension of its Cisco ONE Software licensing model, opening new recurring revenue avenues for the channel.

The networking giant debute the availability of three new advanced security software suites in the program: threat defense for the data center; threat defense for WAN and the edge; and policy and threat defense for access domains. For each of the three domains, the new security suites – which are automatically updated -- provide a single predefined offering with security products and services for partners to sell.

For example in the data center, the suite includes advanced malware protection, next-generation intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and virtualized firewall and services.

ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite

The networking giant continued to expand on its Cisco ONE licensing program with the launch of the company's next-generation ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite. The cloud suite has four offerings: infrastructure automation, service management, cloud management and big data automation. The suites, which can be used in any combination, have annual subscription licenses in one-, three- and five-year options. Here is how they are broken down, according to Cisco:

Infrastructure automation: Speeds time to market through consistent and faster delivery of error-free infrastructure environments to business and application teams.

Service management: Empowers customers with self-service order and service management through a simple, intuitive user interface.

Cloud management: Enables faster time to market while reducing development costs by modeling application profiles once and deploying to multiple hybrid environments.

Big data automation: Drives consistency with one-click installation, provisioning and deployment of Hadoop and Splunk clusters, while also reducing risk with near-real-time diagnostics and historical analysis.

New UCS Developer Center

To support partners in their automation journey with UCS Director, Cisco DevNet revamped the UCS Developer Center to make it easier for developers to leverage the UCS Manager and UCS Director APIs for DevOps automation. Enhancements revealed at the Partner Summit include new self-paced learning labs with personalized learning tracks for infrastructure and application developers.