Alphawest strengthens links to Cisco's data centre technology

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 12:23

IT Industry - Strategy

Optus' IT services subsidiary, Alphawest, has got it hands on the first specimen in the Asia Pacific of Cisco's C-series rack mounted servers, a component of the Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco's push into the virtualised data centre market:

Alphawest demonstrated the product to attendees at Cisco Networkers 2009, saying: "This first public demonstration clearly reinforces Alphawest's expertise in selling, deploying and supporting Cisco's new data centre offerings."

Rob Parcell, CEO, Alphawest said: "This [demonstration] is just one of many steps Alphawest has taken in realigning our data centre practice to develop next generation data centres for our customers that help address complexity, productivity, power and cooling, scalability and agility issues."

While Alphawest is touting the demonstration as simply evidence of its efforts to better provide and support data centres for its customers, it reinforces the possibility of parent Optus getting into the cloud computing or software as a service business. Optus' parent SingTel went down this track earlier this year, and in July, Optus Business marketing director, Scott Mason, told iTWire that the company was "definitely looking at it [SaaS].

Alphawest had one of the largest presences of any Cisco partner at Networkers: with some 90 personnel as delegates or in other roles, and the centre stand at the World of Solutions exhibition.

The company said that its first public demonstration of the C-Series server "clearly reinforces Alphawest's expertise in selling, deploying and supporting Cisco's new data centre offerings...This announcement builds on Alphawest's data centre credentials and expertise including: becoming the first Australian partner to achieve Cisco Data Centre Unified Computing Authorised Technology Provider status; joining forces with the global cloud innovators, VMware and Cisco, to build and deliver feature-rich private enterprise cloud computing solutions for its customers; being the first partner globally to take ownership of the Cisco UCS B-Series [blade server]; continuing to invest and collaborate with Cisco to help customers optimise virtualisation, reduce the total overall cost of the data centre and amplify business results."

Cisco surprised the industry in March 2009 when it unveiled its plans to be a major player in the data centre space: by partnering with other key players to integrate and virtualise storage, networking and processing, but in particular by going head to head with established server vendors by launching its own range of blade servers.

Cisco claims that its approach, "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."

It promises that its next generation data centres will "unleash the full power of virtualisation by uniting compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation resources into a single energy efficient system that can reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility well into the future."

Some industry analysts however predicted that Cisco would face a long uphill battle to gain traction in the data centre market.

Stuart Corner attended Networkers as a guest of Cisco.