Ingram Micro has taken the wrappers off a $6 million datacentre in its Sydney head office.
The Partner Technology Centre (PTC) is a purpose-built facility aimed at giving resellers a new way to demonstrate solutions to customers. The centre features equipment from 12 of Ingram’s vendor partners: Avocent, APC, Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Fortinet, HP, HP ProCurve, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware.
The centre can be used to showcase datacentre offerings such as systems management, virtualisation and lifecycle management, in real-world scenarios.
Ingram Enterprise Technology Group general manager, David Lenz, said PTC was one of the only places resellers could showcase competing and complementary vendor technologies side-by-side.
He said it planned to bring on more vendors in the next 3-4 months and would also continue to expand the datacentre with new technologies.
The facility is big enough to run a 4000-seat enterprise and is supported by 14 solution architects, six pre-sales support engineers and Ingram’s 15-strong licensing team.
It is based on green datacentre practices and will undergo certification through Carbon Planet, Lenz said.
The centre was officially opened at a launch event in Sydney and will be available to resellers from October 1.
Lenz said the distributor expected to have upwards of 80 per cent utilisation in coming months.
Speaking at the launch, APC managing director, Gordon Makyllos, congratulated Ingram on the datacentre initiative and its solutions-oriented approach.
“This [datacentre] could cross the chasm between selling just point product to selling solutions,” he said.
