ANAHEIM, CALIF. – Cisco Systems Inc. is trying to mobilize its channel to take advantage of the potential lucrative business opportunity in the data centre by rolling out two certifications.
As part of Cisco’s surprising Data Center 3.0 initiative, the networking giant wants a small but highly focused segment of its channel network to adopt new specializations in three key areas: network infrastructure, storage networking and application networking.
John Growdon, director, data center solutions, worldwide channels for Cisco, said the two new specializations and another one that is still on the drawing board are a parallel strategy for building channel enablement with the new products such as VFrame and the MDS series, which were released to support the Data Center 3.0 plan.
“There will be a plethora of new products in the Data Center 3.0 strategy and one challenge the partners have is it is difficult to make investments in each product we are rolling out,” Growdon said.The two specializations that are available today are the Advanced Data Center Networking Infrastructure Specialization and the Advanced Data Center Storage Networking Specialization, which replaces the old Storage Networking Specialization.
The third specialization is still in its initial phase of development. Growdon said it would be called Data Center Application Networking Specialization and revolve around building partner competencies on Application Content Engine or ACE. He did not have a firm date as to when this third specialization would be available to the channel.
As for the two that are available today, the Advanced Data Center Networking Infrastructure Specialization teaches partners to design, sell, install and support Cisco Catalyst Ethernet switching and security in the data centre, while the Advanced Data Center Storage Networking Specialization focuses on training partners to better deploy and support intelligent SAN solutions.
Growdon stressed that these specializations focus on data centre and not advanced technologies such as unified communications and wireless.
“The data centre is a unique place in the network and inside a customer organization. A common question from the partner community is how they organize themselves to get after the opportunity, especially with the consolidation of branch office resources in server storage and email,” he added.
According to draft update of Cisco’s global market viewer, which is based on multiple inputs from industry analysts, the addressable data centre market in the U.S. and Canada is worth just under US$4 billion today and growing to more than US$5.5 billion by 2010.
Peter Alexander, vice-president of Cisco’s commercial business and channels, said he believes Data Center 3.0 can be a significant opportunity for channel partners that have hosted services.
“SMEs tend not to build their own data centers, but they do need hosted applications and storage and so the people selling to them with managed services can use this stuff to build massively scalable data centres and provide these services to thousands of SMBs at a time,” Alexander said.
Growdon anticipates that only 80 channel partners will initially adopt these specializations. He hopes it will grow to into the low hundreds.
“This is meant for a set of partners who have breath and interest in getting into this space. Almost every partner we have has something they sell into the data center today, but the focus is on a set of partners who can execute with Cisco into the data centre,” he said.
Cisco also announced the Data Center Assurance Program, a solution level testing program for validated, channel -built networks and system architectures for LAN, SAN, business continuance, optical internetworking, application networking services, global load balancing, and Wide Area Application Services (WAAS).
“Testing architectures that show how you assemble complex data centre will be a benefit. (The channel) will have access to pre-tested designs,” Growdon said.