Ingram launches demo data centre

Ingram Micro Australia has fired a salvo into the enterprise solutions market with the unveiling of a data centre showcasing its partners' technologies.

The Partner Technology Centre had $6 million worth products from 12 vendors. The line-up included networking from Cisco, HP and Brocade, servers and storage from HP, IBM and EMC.

Microsoft and VMware provided virtualisation software, which resellers demonstrated and compared for customers.

The centre was designed for resellers wanting to show customers how technologies would work in their data centres.

In the past, most demonstration data centres were owned by a single vendor and filled with technology under the one brand. The Partner Technology Centre's heterogeneous environment more typically resembled that of the average customer, said David Lenz, general manager of Ingram's enterprise technology group.

The distributor established a small lab a year ago, mainly with HP products, said Lenz. The lab generated a lot of interest with resellers coming several times a week.

The lab was a powerful selling tool; resellers using it experienced a 95 percent close rate with customers, Lenz said.

"We looked at it and said, ‘Wouldn't it be good to demo a full data centre and build it from the ground up with our partners?' "

And it was a signal to the industry that Ingram could expand beyond its traditional, high-volume business. "This is my baby," Lenz said. The centre was a "great proof point of our capability".

The 50KW centre is modular and scalable and has enough power to simulate running a 4000-seat enterprise.

"The scale is important" because it lets customers see how applications behave in environments similar to their own, Lenz said.

"If a customer wants to migrate from one environment to another they can validate the solution that a partner is presenting to them."

Lenz said his enterprise technology group would focus on technology for the data centre, networking and security. He said he hoped the centre would have "upwards of 80 percent utilisation".

He said the demo data centre was a big opportunity for big resellers wanting to prove themselves to their customers. Even enterprise resellers could find the centre useful because of its heterogeneous approach.

"This is the ideal environment to demonstrate your capability in the customer's environment" using the best technology available, Lenz said.

The centre included HP's recently released iSCSI LeftHand SAN, but as yet no universal computing system (UCS) products from Cisco.

However, an Ingram solutions architect said the distributor was talking to vendors to acquire "bleeding edge" technology.  

Lenz added that despite the fact that they were installed side by side their rivals, participating vendors didn't hesitate.

The data centre has been built with environmental principles in mind. It has no raised floor; instead it uses in-rack cooling from APC. Lenz said there were plans to certify the centre's green credentials by consultancy Carbon Planet later in the year.

The centre could demonstrate business continuity, disaster recovery, system management and storage management across single and multiple environments.

Bookings were to commence in the first week of October.