Cisco and Ingram Micro unveils Singapore computing hub

Center provides risk-free environment for partners to share and address their customers' data center requirements.

Cisco and Ingram Micro announced on Thursday 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, according to a Cisco report.

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.

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 virtualisation 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 virtualisation 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.