It’s that time of year again, trade-show season! Interop has always been one of my favorites- I guess it’s the technical roots of it. Interop started back as Networld and Interop. One more of a trade show, the other an interesting technical challenge and exercise. Back when Interop started no one was certain which protocols would win, whether bridging or routing was the way to go, whether it would be Ethernet, ATM, Token Ring, or FDDI/CDDI to the desktop, etc. What Interop did was force multiple vendors to work together to build a network to support the show floor in a matter of days. There were also interoperability tests of new protocols and such between multiple vendors hardware, software, protocols, etc. In the end it became a gathering place for 20,000+ network professionals to see what worked, what didn’t, hear about the latest and greatest… Read More »

I know this is completely off-topic, but I just wanted to take a minute to recognize the great work my executive administrator does. Diane McSweeney is as good as they get -- the reason I have time to write on this blog is because she manages me with an iron fist and sometimes a goading smile. She took a week off these past few days, but still managed to ensure that I will be meeting with as many of you as possible next week at Interop. Diane, a very public thank you for being a great part of Cisco’s Data Center team and making all of us have a bit of fun!

Another vendor reportedly made the following statement:”We should leave [virtualization] control to the server guy and leave the network to the networking guy. That’s an easier approach to swallow.” I found this to be a curious statement and somewhat ironic, considering it was a networking vendor who said this. Read More »

Just a quick invite to everyone to drop by our booth at Interop next week. We will have demonstrations of FCoE, the Nexus 5000, Nexus 7000, and our virtualized Application networking technologies as well. I’ll be running around at a few presentations on Data Center as well as a fun panel on 10Gb Ethernet and where the technology is heading, then drop by and do some booth duty. I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible next week, travel safe if you are joining us.dg

The number of competitors left standing gets smaller, WAN Optimization heats up. In the current market economy technologies that save money, very tangibly will most likely do well- WAN Optmization, Data De-Duplication, etc have a nice outlook. Gaining market share in downturned economic climates is often a good strategy as you can gain footprint and the business is well poised during the regression to the growth mean over time.dg Read More »

I just read John Rath’s recent post on Data Center Links about Cisco’s Data Center Vision. It really reaffirms something for me that I was sitting with some of our key data center leadership discussing today, and that is that blogging just plain works. We get feedback, broadly, in minutes and days that would takes months with ‘focus groups’ and other traditional marketing machinations. We hear from our customers, our partners, our competitors, and we learn what works and what doesn’t- rapidly. I love it. Read More »

As Doug mentioned in his recent blog:http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/2008/03/fcoe_fibrechannel_ethernet_eag.htmlthe MDS platform is here to stay. There have been a lot of announcements from Cisco recently on Nexus, FCoE, and Data Center Ethernet and that’s certainly important news. However, the MDS quietly continues to innovate in the Fibre Channel market while maintaining a leadership position in Director market share (Dell’Oro CQ407). Read More »

Recently a partner to one of our competitors, decided to deride our claims of success in the WAN Optimization market. Thought I would post this recent video of a healthy sized deployment of WAN Optimization technologies by Pacer International.

TheInfoPro, a leading market survey and analysis firm, has completed its fourth “WAVE report” on enterprise IT spending and priorities. Not suprisingly, WAN optimization came out as a very hot technology focus area: “WAN Data Compression and Acceleration Hardware has overtaken 10 Gbps Ethernet to assume the top spot on the Data Networking Infrastructure Technology Heat Index ®in Wave 4.”But another interesting point comes up when TheInfoPro looks at specific vendors in the market… Read More »

One more anti-FCoE post , this time from Greg Ferro, who seems to be a supporter of storage over IP.I am not yet sure I understand why people who should support FCoE (i.e. the networking community) are taking side against it, while the strongest supporters seem to be coming from the storage community. I do not even understand why we should take any sides at all, but I think it’s important to clarify the facts and let readers make the final call. Read More »

When we introduced the Nexus Family as a family of switching products that were purpose-built for the data center we meant this at every conceivable level. Silicon, Systems, Software, Hardware, Power Architecture, even a ‘Form Follows Function’ physical design of our chassis.At the Partner Summit in Honolulu last week, amidst this thing called VOG (Volcanic Fog) I had someone ask me why the Nexus 5000 looked so different than the 7000 from an aesthetics point of view. I came back to the ‘form follows function’ design methodology. The Nexus 5000 is designed for the data center…. Read More »

Just saw a good write up from Mark Lewis over at NEtwork World on NX-OS analysis he did off a build we sent over to him here.’WR T’ still to be added, or you can alias it dg

Innovation in networking has always been associated with animated (sometimes religious, but who cares) debates about what’s right and what’s wrong. And it was only a matter of hours before the iSCSI vs. FCoE debate got started.This time, though, I do not believe it is a either/or type of situation, but rather an “and”… Read More »

By now, I would hope, you are aware of our newest addition to the Nexus family, the Nexus 5020. I’ll dig into that a bit more in a second, but the other Nexus news I wanted to note is that we have started customer shipments of the Nexus 7000 this week (yay--although I am guessing the blogger who accused us of only having cardboard models might be a bit disappointed). Read More »

Last night I posted on FCoE vs. iSCSI. This morning I picked another debate on FCoE vs. Infiniband. The post I have commented to Jerome Wendt’s “Is FCoE a diabolical plot?“I posted the following on Jerome’s blog as a reply, but I want to make sure that Cisco’s blog readers have an opportunity to learn and have an opinion on the topic as well. Read More »