You might have already seen the announcement regarding the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE). We believe this is wonderful news for our customers and partners; and represents an unprecedented collaboration between three highly regarded leaders in the IT industry: Cisco, EMC with VMware.

This coalition was created to increase customers’ business agility – specifically, through greater enterprise IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.

We define a private cloud as a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization. Private clouds can be managed either by that organization or by a third party (e.g. a service provider), and that it can be housed either on or off of the organization’s premises - or in combination. Private clouds allow enterprise customers to rapidly use a virtual IT infrastructure.

By now the benefits of the private cloud computing concept are probably becoming evident to you: better control and security than today’s data center with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs from virtualization. Stated another way, if your business needs multiple IT services – you no longer need to consider the challenges of assembling your own hosting/support/provisioning, management tool complexities, planning equipment for future growth, etc. as the first option – because you now have access to a pre-tested and pre-integrated private cloud model.

(Part 2 of this session follows after the jump.)

As the 4 billion IPv4 addresses run out sometime early next decade (current estimates: 2011-2012), the Internet will stop growing if we do not find ways to tackle the exhaust. The successor to IPv4 - IPv6 - allows 340 undecillion addresses or more than 50 billion billion billion per person on earth. Phew! However, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is not trivial and in a previous post I pointed out Large-Scale NAT (LSN) as one solution, which was also mentioned by Jeff Doyle of Network World. While LSN is a way to ‘preserve’ the life of IPv4 investments, new technologies are needed to ‘prepare’ for IPv4 and IPv6 co-existence. Both of these approaches will pan out over many years, and in the interim providers need to continue to ‘prosper’ from the boundless opportunities of the Internet.

Mike Thompson, Director of U.S. Telco Operations, also gives an overview of Cisco’s consumer strategy and highlights the rigorous IPTV testing executed through the recent Megatest sponsored by Light Reading. Cisco recently participated in the world’s first independently conducted mega test by European Advanced Network Test Center (EANTC). The mega test challenged a vendor’s IP infrastructure-including data center, core, edge, aggregation and access-with simulated support.

The panel entitled, “Emerging Technologies and Business Architectural Impact: Cloud Computing, P2P applications, Social Networking and Infrastructure Required to Scale”

• Vijay Gill, Google
• Donn Lee, Facebook
• Benson Schliesser, Savvis
• Raymond Zhang, BT
• Prof. Ashwin Gumaste, India Institute of Technology-Bombay-Visiting Professor at MIT Multimedia Labs
• Hokuto Sanematsu, KDDI-America
• Paul Geraci, Technology Survey Group
• Kireeti Kompella, Juniper Networks
• George Swallow, Cisco

Seemed that everyone wanted to be on this panel; so to structure the discussion, I prepared a set of questions for the panelists as follows [with their inputs] - [each question could have been a topic for a separate panel session]:

From the SCTE 2009 show floor, Mark Palazzo, GM of the Cable Access Business Unit, discusses the many ways Cisco is leading the drive to more sustainable products and technologies to power the future. Mark highlights Cisco efforts to reduce our carbon footprint through efficient packaging, reduced power consumption, higher headend densities, and more.

From the show floor at SCTE Cable-Tec Expo 2009 in a snow covered Denver, John Horrobin and Vasu Vasudevan discuss the priority of IPTV for cable operators in today’s market, what it will take to make IP video work at scale in cable networks, and when we can expect to see it fully in action.