Home > News > Cisco, Ingram Micro Launch Asia’s First Unified Computing Center
July 15 2010
Cisco, Ingram Micro Launch Asia’s First Unified Computing Center
SINGAPORE, Cisco and Ingram Micro announced on the 24th June the launch of Asia’s first Cisco Center for Unified Computing in Singapore. The center will provide Ingram Micro’s customers and channel partners with a next-generation data center platform that will accelerate the delivery of new services simply, reliably and with a high degree of security through end-to-end provisioning and migration support. It will also feature technology from APC, CA, Hitachi Data Systems, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, VMware and other partners.
As the pioneering solution center in the region, the Cisco Center for Unified Computing will be a test bed for Cisco partners to simulate real-life scenarios in a heterogeneous hardware and software application environment. The center provides a risk-free environment for partners to share and address their customers’ data center requirements and challenges. Cisco’s investment with Ingram Micro includes training and additional staff to manage the solution center.
Facts:
-- As the first unified computing solution center in Asia, the Cisco
Center for Unified Computing, located at the Ingram Micro offices in
Singapore’s Kallang district, will be a landmark implementation and
the precursor to an expansion of the concept into the rest of Asia.
-- Ingram Micro is also the first Cisco distributor in the region to
deploy the Cisco Unified Computing System with an ecosystem of
partners.
-- In addition to the Cisco Unified Computing System, the center has a
full suite of other data center solutions, including Hitachi Data
Systems and APC power and racking solutions. Applications from
Microsoft, Symantec and VMware are also configured to allow realistic
simulations of a data center’s environment.
-- Data center virtualization has created a market transition in which
information technology professionals are trying to reduce costs and
increase flexibility. During this transition, the Cisco Center for
Unified Computing will help Ingram Micro’s customers and partners
resolve their data center challenges by uniting network, computing and
virtualization resources.
-- The Cisco Unified Computing System streamlines data center resources
to reduce the total cost of ownership, scales service delivery to
increase business agility, and radically reduces the number of devices
requiring setup, management, power, cooling and cabling.
-- Globally, more than 900 customers have already adopted the Cisco
Unified Computing System.
-- The Cisco Unified Computing System is part of the company’s Data
Center 3.0 solutions, which help data centers transition to 10 Gigabit
architectures, virtualization, unified fabric solutions, cloud
computing and green operations.
-- Cisco also recently announced planned updates to its Cisco Unified
Computing System platform, as well as expansions in its rapidly
growing ecosystem of technology partners and developers.
-- Ingram Micro is the world’s largest technology distributor and a
leading technology sales, marketing and logistics company for the
information technology industry worldwide.
About the Cisco Unified Computing System
-- The Cisco Unified Computing System unites computational, network,
storage access and virtualization resources in 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.
-- Based on industry standards, the Cisco Unified Computing System is a
new computing model that uses integrated management and combines a
"wire once" unified fabric with an industry-standard computing
platform to optimize virtualization, reduce a data center’s total
overall cost, and provide dynamic resource provisioning for increased
business agility. The Cisco Unified Computing System:
— Can reduce the total cost of ownership by up to 20 percent in
capital expenditures (capex) and up to 30 percent in operational
expenditures (opex).
— Improves IT productivity and business agility, provisioning
applications in minutes instead of days and shifting the focus
from IT maintenance to IT innovation.
— Increases scalability without added complexity; it is managed as a
single system, whether it has one or 320 servers with thousands of
virtual machines.
— Improves energy efficiency by significantly reducing power and
cooling costs.
— Can provide interoperability and investment protection through an
industry-standards-based infrastructure.
Supporting Quotes:
-- Irving Tan, managing director for Singapore and Brunei at Cisco
With
business requirements increasing and the IT budget staying where it
is, organizations are looking for a solution that allows them to
quickly scale and reallocate resources when they are not in use. The
Cisco Center for Unified Computing will be a great showcase of
solutions with our partners, and it reaffirms our relationship with
Ingram Micro and validates the demand for a platform that unites
computation, the network, and virtualization.
-- Andre Smit, managing director for Cisco data center sales in Asia
The
data center is the digital nervous system of any business, and the
data center becoming more virtualized as a result of market
transitions gives us the opportunity to have a more agile but also
adaptable environment to produce top-line growth as well as contain
costs. We used this opportunity to develop a platform that will
optimize virtualization and reduce the complexity of managing the data
center. The launch of the Cisco Center for Unified Computing at Ingram
Micro is a realization of that market opportunity, and we are excited
to offer these solutions first to customers and partners in
Singapore.
-- Francis Choo, executive managing director, Ingram Micro
We are
excited to launch the region’s first Cisco Center for Unified
Computing here at Ingram Micro Singapore. We believe that a strong
ecosystem of partners is critical to the delivery and support of data
center architectures and this collaboration with Cisco will improve
how IT responds to the rapidly changing business demands. This
next-generation data center platform accelerates the delivery of new
services simply, reliably, and securely through end-to-end
provisioning and migration support and here at Ingram Micro, we look
forward to work with Cisco and other industry leaders to provide a
complete, standards-based solution.
-- Benedict Soh, Business vice president Singapore, APC by Schneider
Electric
APC and Cisco are long standing partners in the development
of innovative solutions and best practices in the deployment of data
centres and networks. We are delighted that Cisco has selected APC
solutions for the latest Cisco Center for Unified Computing in
Singapore. We are glad to join Cisco in the initiative to offer truly
scalable data centres offering Pay as you grow approach, reduced
complexity and limiting Opex linked to energy costs and operations.
Looking ahead, we see many great business opportunities for us to
jointly deliver next generation data centre solutions to our customers
in this region.
-- Ravi Rajendran, vice president and general manager for ASEAN, Hitachi
Data Systems
At Hitachi Data Systems, we believe that data drives our
world and information is the new currency. The trend towards unified
computing is unmistakeable, with servers, storage and networking
systems evolving to fit more efficiently into the data center of the
future. We are pleased that Cisco and Ingram Micro have taken this
trend to a new level by opening the first Cisco Center for Unified
Computing in Singapore. We hope that it will help to deliver customers
and channel partners greater efficiency, agility and investment
protection.
-- Patrick Liew, Singapore country manager, Intel Technology Asia
The
Intel Xeon processor family provides the intelligent performance,
smart energy efficiency, and 24/7 dependability for advanced
reliability even with the most demanding applications. Having a
unified computing solution centre powered by the Intel Xeon processors
provides local and even regional customers a test bed to explore how
they can leverage virtualization technology to dynamically deploy
applications and also try out new business intelligence software that
can optimize their competitive edge without any IT downtime.
-- Whye Mun Sun, director SMS&P, Microsoft Singapore
Today,
enterprises want IT efficiency in three ways—reduced costs,
increased productivity and innovation. Microsoft is pleased to be part
of the Unified Computing alliance as it enables companies to realize
their business potential through the magic of our software and our
cloud computing platforms.
-- Tan Yuh Woei, country manager, Singapore, Symantec
As enterprises
embrace the next-generation data center platform, it is imperative
that they are empowered to protect, store and recover information in
an efficient and reliable manner through a single, unified platform.
With data growing at a phenomenal rate of 50 percent, enterprises
today are increasingly challenged to keep pace with data growth with
shrinking IT budgets. Symantec is delighted to be part of this
landmark initiative to help enterprises address these challenges with
our leading data protection solutions by integrating deduplication
everywhere to offer complete data and machine protection, even in a
virtualized environment.
-- Ed Lenta, general manager, VMware Southeast Asia
The Cisco Centre for
Unified Computing will bring VMware’s cloud computing technologies
together with other industry solutions to help enterprises in Asia
test bed new data centre models that unify virtualised network, server
and storage resources under the UCS framework. This will fundamentally
change the way data centres are built and redefine the benchmarks for
business agility and productivity.
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