eChannelLine Daily News 2-November-2009 Comstor to distribute Cisco UCS by Mark Cox Distributor Westcon Group, Inc. has announced that its Comstor Worldwide organization will distribute the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) solutions to qualified channel partners worldwide. "This is significant because Cisco has looked at taking this product to market directly, and now is going through distribution," said Dean Douglas, President and CEO of Westcon Group. Cisco UCS integrates network, computational, storage access and virtualization elements into a single cohesive system --resulting in simplified system management, higher performance and greater availability. It offers many operational benefits, especially for mid-market companies looking to decrease their IT hardware footprints and power consumption. "Cisco is now looking at the data centre holistically from a tech standpoint," said John Growdon, Director of Go-To-Market of Worldwide Channels, Cisco. "The combination of all these is targeted to save customers 20-40% on running and operating data centres, the unified fabric, unified management, expanded memory capabilities -- all of which make up the unified computing environment." Cisco announced the UCS B Series Blade implementation back in March, and it began shipping in limited quantities at the end of July. It is being brought to market through the Authorized Partner Program and is limited to a very select group of partners. The C series, which was announced in June, extends the portfolio down in the rack mount space, and will go to market much more broadly through the channel. Both will be available to qualified resellers through Comstor. This is not an exclusive deal however, and the products will also be available to qualified resellers through Cisco's other distribution partners. "The B series is for the upper commercial into the enterprise," said Bill Corbin, Executive Vice President, Comstor Worldwide. "It needs enough compute power going on to make sense for it to be used. But the C series with rack mount format will be in the SMB as well as the midmarket. It will be able to migrate traditional networking VARs into the data centre." "We've just entered into the expanded demand phase, incorporating more partners into the B series," Growdon said. "These partners will look to ComStor to get hold of this product." There will be up to 200 partners worldwide carrying the B series following this expansion. C In contrast, the number of C series partners able to carry the product will be in the low thousand area. Corbin said they are seeing strong interest from their partner base, and he estimated that between 50-60 percent of them would be looking to move and adopt the UCS. Comstor will be supporting them by introducing robust programs and services offerings around Cisco's USC solution platform over the coming weeks and is currently developing sophisticated global training centres to accelerate regional market penetration. "We really believe that this is a disruptive technology which redefines the data centre play, and nobody is more uniquely qualified to deliver it than Comstor," Corbin said.