Curtin Uni pioneers Cisco Unified Computing System

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 09 February 2010 19:39

Business IT - Networking

Cisco will tomorrow, 10 February, hold a, global, Internet TV broadcast featuring Curtin University CIO, Peter Nikoletatos as "one of the first Asia Pacific customers to deploy the Cisco Unified Computing System."

Cisco issued a global press release to announce the event, which will be broadcast live at 16.00hrs AEST. Joining Cisco will be representatives of Optus and its subsidiary, Alphawest, along with representatives of VMware and EMC, partners in Cisco's virtualised data centre strategy.

Cisco announced UCS last March, claiming that it "unites compute, network, storage access and virtualisation into a scalable, modular architecture that is managed as a single system," an architecture that "bridges the silos in the data centre into one unified architecture using industry standard technologies." A key component of the strategy is a Cisco blade server developed in partnership with Intel.

In May Alphawest became one of the first companies in Australia certified by Cisco to promote UCS when it achieved Cisco Data Centre Unified Computing Authorised Technology Provider status. Alphawest gave the first showing of the new Cisco blade server in September at Cisco Networkers.

However the kudos of making the first announcement of a contract for Cisco UCS in Australia went to Dimension Data. In December the company announced that it had signed its first UCS contract with the Catholic Education Network (CEnet) to help CEnet virtualise its server infrastructure and prepare the organisation to provide cloud-based and shared services to educational institutions and classrooms across fifteen Catholic education systems in Australia.

Meanwhile Cisco's arch rival Juniper Networks is developing its own vision of the unified virtualised data centre, announced in February 2009 as the Status Project. It is expected to announce the first Status products in the second quarter of 2010.