Comstor inaugurates India’s first LEAP Center

Weston Group's division and a global distributor of Cisco products, Comstor, recently inaugurated a full-fledged Cisco datacenter solutions experience centre in Santa Cruz, Mumbai. This centre of excellence is setup to provide solution providers, VARs hands-on training and experience solutions especially related to virtualized data centres.

This centre is called LEAP (Learn, Experience, Architect and Plan) Center will provide an opportunity to understand and experience a broad range of leading data center states Arun Dharmalingam, VP-Partner Led Velocity and Distribution Sales, Cisco India. He further added that this center is for the enablement of partners and acquainting them with the latest technology offerings and solutions.

At the LEAP Centers, a wide-array of solutions are available, from the Cisco Unified Computing System, to storage from NetApp and EMC, and virtualized applications from VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. This center is designed in a way that it can replicate real-world scenarios faced in deploying virtualized servers with customers.

Channel partners can utilize this center to showcase to their existing and prospective clients a wide-array of complementary solutions, including Cisco's Unified Computing System, core switching and routing, application delivery and data center security products as well as storage offerings and virtualized applications and other data center solutions.

Dharmalingam said, "We want to enable smaller partners through this initiative but we also wan to leverage the strengths of our distributors. We want to reach market faster and this center will enable us to equip our partners with the right technology and solutions." He further added that there is a demand for data center related technologies and partners want to see the demo so this was ideal solution to address their requirements.

Russell Blackburn, Cloud and Datacenter Business Development Director, Comstor said, "LEAP Center will provide training on data center-related products." He also added that there are only two more such LEAP center by Weston Group in the world.

The funding for this center was primarily from Cisco and the overall cost to setup this center was about Rs. 400,000.