Logicalis one of the First UK Partners to Achieve NetApp Data Center – FlexPod Specialisation

Slough, UK, 18 June 2012: International solutions provider, Logicalis UK, has announced it has completed requirements for NetApp Data Center – FlexPod™ Specialisation in the UK. The newly established specialisation recognises Logicalis as a trusted advisor for customers wishing to migrate to next-generation data centers, having completed rigorous levels of testing to demonstrate expert-level competency across unified server, storage, and networking architectures.

Acknowledging company-wide sales, design, architect and implementation competencies, the specialisation validates the completion of Cisco Unified Computing Technology Specialisation, NetApp Professional Services Certification and FlexPod sales, architect, design, and implementation best-practices training.

Julie Parrish, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Sales at NetApp, comments: “NetApp continues to invest into its partner ecosystem and has a variety of sales enablement programmes in place to accelerate time-to-value for partners and customers. We are pleased to recognize Logicalis UK Ltd. as one of our first UK channel partners to achieve NetApp Data Center – FlexPod Specialisation. Customers can count on the proven expertise of Logicalis to facilitate their journey to data center transformation.”

FlexPod is a pre-tested, optimised and pre-validated data center solution that combines networking, compute and storage resources in a shared or “unified” infrastructure in order to better support multiple application workloads.

Logicalis was responsible for the design and implementation of numerous FlexPod environments throughout 2011, including private FlexPod for Worldskills London 2011, the largest international skills competition for young people in the world, and the UK’s first hybrid FlexPod at Loughborough University.

Tom Kelly, Managing Director at Logicalis UK, says; “We’re committed to leading the way in innovating operational efficiency for our customers. Logicalis has long believed that the maturity of the FlexPod virtual architecture makes it a mainstream approach to deploying private data centre platforms, already seen in the success of its first deployments. We’re delighted to be one of the first to achieve this level of specialisation, it not only demonstrates the ongoing investment to our partnership with NetApp, but also our continued commitment to collaborate on and contribute toward the development of efficient cloud architectures for UK organisations.”