NEW ORLEANS — Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) added more server offerings for the channel and announced a new business continuity offering for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) during its Solutions Summit event this week.
Both the expanded “EPSD 3.0” portfolio and the Intel Server Continuity Suite were mentioned at last year’s event, but the company has now delivered on its promise of more offerings for channel partners.
The company’s enterprise platform and services division (EPSD) has created 19 new server motherboards in its E5-2600 Xeon product family and added 37 new chassis for partners, Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data centre and connected systems group, announced on Monday.
Partners had asked for a broader set of solutions in the server and systems space, and Intel delivered on its promise to meet that, she said.
The offerings span several segments including small business, storage solutions and cloud computing. High performance computing is also a major area of focus for the company. “It’s a key segment, a segment that will just continue to grow,” Bryant said.
Each of those areas will provide major opportunity for channel partners, especially with the expected explosion of connected devices expected between now and 2015. Partners should consider those devices extensions of the data centre, she said.
Small business is also a critical growth area, since about 60 per cent of that market don’t actually have servers, she added.
Intel has seen strong adoption of its latest Xeon E5 processors following its early shipping program began last September. The processors were only officially launched earlier this month. “This product is for servers, storage and networks,” she said, and increases performance by 80 per cent from the previous generation.
Partners also asked for more offerings beyond just hardware, Bryant said. The Intel Server Continuity Suite, shipping now, will be integrated with Intel’s Servers and Systems line. It’s designed to help SMBs keep track of their environments while having continuous data protection. It also uses a simple user interface, which Intel says is key when targeting the SMB market.
About a quarter of small businesses don’t have any backup solution, according to Bryant, and this offering will help channel partners increase their revenue on each server they sell by 25 to 30 per cent.
The suite uses data protection and recovery technology from Santa Clara, Calif.-based InMage Systems. It includes predictive hardware failure and backs up data in real time. It also offers almost immediate recovery time where users can recover data from a very specific point in time within seconds.
The channel is the data centre group’s third largest path to market and in 2011, the channel grew its business in this area by 31 per cent. The company expects to double its data centre business growth (by units shipped) by 2015, Bryant said. Its Ivy Bridge E3 processors are slated to launch next quarter.
