NetStar gets Cisco unified computing certification, seeks staff

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 01 December 2009 05:03

IT Industry - Strategy

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, and is looking for multi-skilled engineers to help it address this market

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 compute, network, storage access, and virtualisation resources into a single energy efficient 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 tightened its relationship with two of those partners, EMC and 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 market complete data centre solutions combining their respective 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, assessment 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 iTWire "Currently VMware, Cisco and EMC all have separate accreditations, but I understand there will be a new certification early next year across all three vendors and we are very confident we will be one of the first organisation to be certified."

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