Cisco Partners: UCS Today, ACI and SDN Tomorrow?
Today, a growing number of Cisco Systems partners promote the company’s Unified Computing System. But is UCS ultimately a stepping stone to Cisco’s ACI (Application-centric Infrastructure) vision? Cisco’s John Growdon, senior director for channel business development, data center, weighs in.
First, a little background. As most channel partners know: The race is on to build software-defined networks (SDN) and software-defined data centers (SDDC). The goal is to give partners and customers easier ways to manage converged server, storage and network systems. Some companies want to promote commodity hardware as part of their SDN and SDDC visions. Cisco, in stark contrast, is promoting Insieme — a company and technology provider acquired late last year — in tandem with Cisco’s evolving portfolio of data center solutions.
But how will the Insieme family and ACI push align with Cisco’s existing UCS efforts? Growdon shared a range of thoughts in a December 2013 interview — which The VAR Guy is finally ready to share here. Read on for some paraphrased thoughts and direct quotes from Growdon.
The VAR Guy: Let’s start with UCS and its market impact so far. How has that performed vs. your original expectations?
Growdon: I think it has exceeded my expectations. The data center space is an existing market. Cisco played in it prior to the UCS days. Catalyst was one of the main backbones. We were there. But with advent of Nexus, fiber channel over Ethernet and more we were positioned really well in this place. And with the UCS introduction, we went from zero to No. 2 in the blade server space in roughly five years. I don’t think you can be anything but surprised by that.
The VAR Guy: What’s the state of UCS in the channel in terms of partner momentum and adoption?
Growdon: We continue to see significant growth around UCS. Dial back one year to Q1 2013; we had about 1,100 specialized partners on UCS. In Q1 2014, we had 1,903 specialized partners — that’s 70% growth or so in specialized partners. That speaks volumes in terms of partners embracing UCS. Overall the march continues.
The VAR Guy: Has UCS attracted new partners to Cisco, or is the partner base mostly existing partners?
Growdon: The reality is we see both. We’ve been playing in the data center space for many years because of the Catalyst 6000. So we had existing relationship with partners that were selling networking from us and servers from someone else. We worked with those partners who were close with us on networking and trained them on UCS. But those partners also were resellers of competing server platforms in most cases….We’ve also seen several hundred new partners coming in that had not sold Cisco previously.
The VAR Guy: What trends are you seeing in service provider adoption — cloud services providers, hosting companies, telcos?
Growdon: The answer is increased adoption. Roughly 100 cloud providers offer Cisco-powered type-services — including managed and cloud services. And the number is increasing. Plus we have some very large players in that space. We’re trying to work through a set of providers that want to offer cisco.
The VAR Guy: Are there synergies between UCS and the Insieme/ACI initiative?
Growdon: Absolutely. That’s exactly the strategy. When we came out with UCS, there are service profiles to allow system admins to configure bare metal or virtual servers…It has been a unique offering with UCS since the beginning. It’s a reason we have a following on UCS. We learned from that. The Insieme and the Nexus 9000 use the same concept across the fabric of the data center. They’re called application network profiles. It offers the same advantages as service profiles to configure and rapidly set up the fabric for a given application. It will save rollout and deployment times into that environment. It will effectively deliver on a lot of the SDN promises. The concepts are parallel and you’ll see them come together.
The VAR Guy: Now that Cisco owns Insieme, what type of partner program initiatives are coming for Insieme and ACI?
Growdon: We’ve only spoken a little about it [publicly]. I’ll give you the framework. When you look at the Nexus 9000 platform, look at it in two ways: Standalone mode and ACI/Framework mode. Standalone, it’s a very large fast switch with low latency. Take out the old switch gear, put in a new 9000 and you can use the same fiber plan. It can save millions [of dollars]. It’s a nice drop-in replacement. And it also prepares you for ACI. In the future, we’ll deliver products that are specific to ACI, and you’ll be able to add them to the 9000’s.
The standalone is what we’re shipping today — chassis, modules and those types of things. We believe all of our Nexus resellers can sell and understand those offerings… As we start introducing the ACI portions of the product with the controller and upgrades, in that case partners will require specific training. That portion will have specific classes and programs. You’ll see that training in the first half of 2014.
The VAR Guy: Cisco Partner Summit 2014 is right around the corner. Are there any pre-conference themes that partners should track?
Growdon: I think partners should seek to understand what we’re doing in the data center. I’ve never seen anything in my career like what we’ve done in this data center space–especially in the channel. I get more excited every day with what we’re working on. It’s a great space, with lots of challenges but lots of opportunity for partners.