Stuart Miniman from EMC leads a whiteboard ‘chalk-talk’ on FibreChannel over Ethernet. An important part of Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 initiative FCoE is continuing to be embraced by an ever larger vendor and now customer community. With over 250 customers having adopted the Nexus family of Data Center class switches we are well on our way to a unified fabric- one where everything goes over one network; but also where every host is capable of accessing all storage resources, without disrupting today’s effective ITIL processes and defined workflows.

Had many investor meetings this week where we discussed ‘the numbers’. So we put these numbers together into one presentation to consistently discuss ‘the numbers’ and how they create the virtual envelope we operate within to create customer value in the data center.

Desktop virtualization has evolved in 2008 as a promising technology, with major vendors announcing or updating their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions. IDC predicts that desktop virtualization will grow to $2 billion annually by 2011, while Gartner forecasts that up to 660 million PCs will be virtualized in that same timeframe. Good blog on desktop virtualizationPete Foley, CEO of RingCube (a VDI component vendor and VMware partner), has written a descriptive and useful blog entry on VDI recently. In the entry, he highlights some of the benefits for IT, including:* Virtual desktop enabled deployment can reduce up to $2,800 (includes approximately $1,200 in hardware/software costs) and elimination of most ongoing support costs (Gartner TCO report, 8-08)* Extends PC life up to seven years * Added benefits of disaster recovery, security and agility Read More »

I ran across an interesting article in the Dec 15 Wall Street Journal on Google’s attempts to negotiate a “fast lane” with service providers for its content. The same article also notes that both Microsoft and Yahoo have softened their support for net neutrality. First of all, what do you think about net neutrality--the death of the internet or is it necessary to fund the next round of investment--do you even care? Second, what are the implications for cloud computing? I can think of a couple of scenarios:1) “Fast lane” type SLAs will give businesses the comfort level they need to try moving workloads into the cloud--similarly, more bankable transport will accelerate federated or intra-cloud movement of workloads2) The incremental costs of “fast lane” transport will weaken the ROI of cloud computing and slow things downCertainly, Google’s plan to co-lo at the edge should open up some interesting options and would seem to force the hand of the other players.

Based on our conversations at the C-Scape event this week, or #cscape for Twitter users, we made this quick video explaining the evolution of our portfolio and a bit about what we see happening in the data center, virtualization, and cloud computing markets. dg

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