Cisco Unified Computing System kit to hit Australia in August

Australian channel partners and companies will be able to get their hands on Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) equipment from mid-August.

Speaking at a datacentre roundtable in Sydney, Cisco datacentre general manager, Dylan Morison, said broader shipping started two weeks ago.

“We had beta devices out there with customers,” he said. “Manufacturing is going gang busters now and its full steam ahead. We do have devices with partners that have demonstration equipment.”

The vendor also has the UCS kit in its Technical Assistance Lab in the Sydney suburb of St Leonards.

“Our datacentres are starting to now get racked out with unified computing systems,” he said.

The UCS is designed to tightly integrate computing, networking, storage access and virtualisation into a single platform. It features memory extension technology for scaling virtual machines (VM); virtual adapters to reduce the number of physical adapters in a server; embedded management; and service profiles designed to stay with a VM as it moves around an enterprise.

The system, however, rules out the participation of non-Cisco blade and rack servers in a UCS environment.

Cisco has said previously that it had no plans to open up UCS to incumbent datacentre servers from HP, IBM, Dell or Sun.

In June, Cisco introduced a dedicated datacentre partner program and individual certifications to drive take-up of its Unified Computing architecture. The initiatives coincided with the release of the vendor’s first range of rack-mounted servers.

An early adopter of UCS, the professional division of Thomson Reuters, is six months into a massive datacentre virtualisation project has claimed a significant payback on costs.