| NetStar has been accredited as a Cisco data centre unified computing partner, one of only three organisations in Australia approved to sell Cisco's Unified Computing Solution, its recently announced architecture for the data centre spanning servers, storage, networking and virtualisation.
Cisco launched UCS in March when it unveiled its own blade servers developed in partnership with Intel. It said that UCS was designed to "unite computer, network, storage access, and virtualisation resources into a single energy effiecient system." Cisco also announced numerous other partners in that initiative: BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat and VMware.
Last month it tightnened its relationshop with two of those partners, EMC adn VMware, by forming a coalition, Virtual Computing Environment. The coalition aims to help enterprise customers build 'private cloud' virtualised data centres by offering a complete data centre package of integrated servers, storage, networking and virtualisation software.
The three partners will amrket complete data centre solutions combining their repsective products and sold as "Vblock Infrastructure Packages" designed for specific needs.
NetStar is also a VMware Enterprise Partner, an EMC Velocity Advantage Partner and has certification in Cisco's Advanced Data Centre Networking Infrastructure (DCNI) and Advanced Data Centre Networked Storage (DCNS). Its VMware and EMC partner relationships enable it to offer VMWare licences, assesment services and outsourced management of VMware infrastructure including managed virtual infrastructure, EMC storage and back-up consulting, implementation and fully managed storage solutions.
Oliver Descoeudres, marketing director of NetStar, told Exchange Daily "Currently VMware, Cisco and EMC all have sperate accreditations, but I understand there will be a new certification early next year across all three vendors and we are very confiednt we wll be one oe the first organisation to be certified."
He said that teh Cisco UCS products were still very new in Australia. "It has been shipped and tehre are some implementations but it has only been available for a couple fo months. We havea couple of customers wo are keen to be among the first to deploy the new technology. We would eb expecting sales in the first half of the year."
NetStar launched its data centre consulting division about six months and Descoedres said he expected the data centre market to become a very significant part of the company's business. "We are expecting 10 percent in the first 12 months, and beyond that, anything up to 50 percent over the next three years."
The company is looking for additional exertise to service this growing business, Descoeudres said. "We are actively recruiting and looking to cross skill existing technical staff, We believe that to do data centre effectve people need to understand at least two of the three technologies [servers, storage and networking]. We are looking at training our network specialists in data centres and wea re recruiting as fast as we can find the right people.
"We are looking for server and VMware technical engineers who have exposure to networking so tehy can understand the bigger picture, but it is hard to find engineers who are strong in two or three of those areas." |
