First win for Cisco's blades in Australia

Cisco System's unified computing concept has received its first public thumbs up as Dimension Data announced Friday it has signed a deal to roll out Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) for the Catholic Education Network in Australia.

Dimension Data will be installing a single Cisco chassis with Cisco blades, NetApp expansion shelves and VMware's vSphere 4. Hardware and services will cost around A$330,000 (US$301,521).

The Catholic Education Network (CENet) provides data center services on a needs basis to 15 catholic dioceses. It had 40 standalone servers, of which 20 were ready to be refreshed. The network looked at virtualization when it was doing that refresh and came across Cisco's offering.

CENet's Solutions architect Glen Gibson told ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet Australia that CENet realized that the UCS was going to cost the same as other blade systems, but had tighter integration with VMware, enabled easy provisioning and was going to save costs on cabling. Considering the organization already had a good relationship with Dimension Data and Cisco, he called it a "bit of a no-brainer".

Gibson said that there was a misconception about Cisco's UCS that it was only for large businesses. "The entry-level position was quite affordable," he said.

Read more of "First Aussie win for Cisco's blades" at ZDNet Australia.