I am an unabashed fan of social networking. For the data center team, being able to get direct, unfiltered feedback from the market has been a boon for making sure we are tracking in the right direction. I also thoroughly …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 29, 2009 at 06:09PM
You know, our customers, even folks that are not our customers, are always interested what Cisco IT is up to. Our IT strategy is intrinsic to our business strategy and folks are always curious to know what is working and …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 19, 2009 at 09:56AM
So, we continue to see broad traction in the industry for the Cisco Unified Computing System. The latest passenger on the UCS Bus is Oracle, which recently certified and validated the Cisco UCS platform for Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.3 and …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 16, 2009 at 09:49AM
There still continues to be an immense amount of confusion around what exactly constitutes cloud computing. As an example, over the last few days, there has been a spirited debate whether the Sidekick service Microsoft/Danger offered was a cloud-based service …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 13, 2009 at 10:49AM
Thinking about test drives reminded me that my 12 year-old son will be driving soon (yikes!) which then got me thinking about other rites of passage he will soon encounter such as the roller-coaster experience of asking a girl out …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 12, 2009 at 08:35AM
Well, boys and girls, I have got a couple of cool things to report on the Cisco Unified Computing System front. First, and foremost, I am happy to present the latest iteration of the UCS: the C-Series rack servers. …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 09, 2009 at 10:35AM
I thought I would re-visit my cathedral-builders blog, since a couple of interesting stories popped up this week. For starters, Nick Lippis posted a well thought out blog on his short list of cathedral-builders (Cisco, HP, and IBM). Yes, …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on October 08, 2009 at 11:50AM
For those of you that missed this week’s broadcast or ran afoul of some technical gremlins (sorry about that), here is the on-demand link: http://tools.cisco.com/cmn/jsp/index.jsp?id=92757 One of my favorite parts of the show was the conversation with Derek Masseth, Senior Director …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on September 30, 2009 at 07:15PM
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) seems to be a popular topic for the last couple of weeks. There have been a number of useful posts that I have ran across recently that I thought I would share: Nigel Poulton …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on September 28, 2009 at 10:19AM
So Cisco has been on the forefront in leading Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) in ANSI standard bodies along with Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards for lossless Ethernet in IEEE. We were the also the first company to productize a …Read more.
Posted by Kash Shaikh on September 28, 2009 at 09:07AM
Hope you all have been keeping well! “Data Centers of the Future”, “DC 3.0”, and similar terms have been getting a lot of play lately. They remind me of the work Cisco has been doing to compare the benefits of …Read more.
Posted by Simon Aspinall on September 25, 2009 at 12:08PM
With some recent upgrades to our Cisco MDS family of storage networking switches, I think its a good time to revisit strategies for protection against data loss, since it’s always a top of mind in any data center. While there …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on September 25, 2009 at 11:34AM
One of my favorite stories is one attributed to Christopher Wren, the architect behind St Paul’s Cathedral. The short version of the story is that Wren was visiting the worksite for St. Paul’s Cathedral. He came across a bricklayer diligently …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on September 23, 2009 at 01:37PM
I am happy to share that the Cisco Unified Computing System was just awarded Gold Award in the “Hardware for Virtualization” category at the Best of VMworld 2009 Awards. The system represents a lot of hardwork and commitment from a …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on September 03, 2009 at 02:57PM
So, since we initially demo-ed an inter-data center VMotion solution and CiscoLive!, we have been working dilligently with VMware to develop and refine the solution. Inter-data center workload mobility has a lot of moving parts involved. Essentially, you need to …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 31, 2009 at 09:43PM
Pretty much any major trade show is an exercise in barely controlled chaos and VMworld 2009 is no exception, but all the pieces are falling into place and I am looking forward to a good show next week. Last year, …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 28, 2009 at 12:32PM
Since I am apparently feeling a bit nostalgic about VMworld and all the frenetic activity we had about this time last year, getting ready for the announcement of the Cisco Nexus 1000V, I caught up with some of the original …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 27, 2009 at 02:38PM
So, its coming up to our one year anniversary of the initial Nexus 1000V announcement and its kind cool to see the progression from the announcement to a 2,000+ user beta to customers starting to deploy the product. First off, …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 26, 2009 at 11:27AM
TRIVIA: The first video MTV ever played was The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”, which was sadly all too prescient as evidenced by the subsequent popularity of Milli Vanilli. So, a good friend of mine recently pondered if virtualization …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 20, 2009 at 12:11PM
While we are getting a great deal of traction on the vision behind the Cisco Unified Computing System and the idea of an integrated system that combines network, compute, and virtualization in a single platform, folks sometimes wonder if they …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 19, 2009 at 02:26PM
Dylan Morison, Cisco’s Data Centre Lead for Australia and New Zealand, participated in a series of CIO Roundtables with Dimension Data, EMC and VMware last week and in this video shares some of the common themes discussed. At a special …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on August 07, 2009 at 01:55AM
At CiscoLive! one of the more common questions I was asked was around the future of enterprise IT from an organizational perspective. To me, the shift in the conversation is an indicator that folks are continuing down the path of …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on July 30, 2009 at 03:58PM
So, we continue to see traction with customers for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) because IT organizations are beginning to understand both immediate benefits through reduced capital and operating costs (a big incentive in today’s economy) and the longer term …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on July 21, 2009 at 09:23PM
“The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903. “If I’d asked people what they …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on July 16, 2009 at 03:54PM
Well, we are all safely back from CiscoLive. Speaking for the blogger crew, we had a lot of fun and had the chance to chat with a large number of customers across the length of the event. To a person, …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on July 06, 2009 at 04:43PM
Tonight Cisco Omar Sultan, James Urquhart, Chris Hoff and EMC Stuart Miniman , Chad Sakac , joined me at the Marriott Hotel to share about their second day at Cisco Live. Today we were at lunch with David Lawler, VP …Read more.
Posted by Didier Rombaut on June 30, 2009 at 06:02PM
Cisco Data Center Solutions James Urquhart, Chris Hoff and EMC Technologist Stuart Miniman share their first impressions at Cisco Live 2009 If you are not in San Francisco today, you can watch John Chambers key notes, as well as the …Read more.
Posted by Didier Rombaut on June 30, 2009 at 05:37AM
Do you believe in the power of numbers? The other day I was struck by the number 7. At Cisco Live next week, the Cisco Data Center Solutions team is building an amazing demo called “The Data Center of the …Read more.
Posted by Didier Rombaut on June 24, 2009 at 09:44AM
We’ve been talking about Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision & strategy for a while now. How Cisco Data Center 3.0 provides a granular, multi-phase journey for transforming data center to meet the evolving needs of the business with a strategy …Read more.
Posted by Kash Shaikh on June 18, 2009 at 05:33PM
As I have noted before, the Cisco/VMware relationship has some deep roots and our engineers have been having much fun together. Check out this video featuring Mark Bakke, a Technical Leader at Cisco chatting about the N1KV/vSphere solution: …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 18, 2009 at 01:54PM
Here is an updated video (in two parts) in which Pierre, one of our TMEs takes you through an in-depth tour of the Cisco Nexus 1000V including config, port profiles and VMotion in action. If these entice you to want …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 17, 2009 at 07:56AM
I sat down with Brian Schwartz again last week to dig a bit deeper into the Unified Computing System Manager. There has been a lot of speculation recently that UCSM only worked for virtualized environments. Well, as you will see …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 15, 2009 at 10:36AM
So, for me, one of the best parts of working here at Cisco is the opportunity to work with some incredibly smart folks. Today, I can add one more person to that group of folks—Christofer Hoff is joining the Cisco …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 08, 2009 at 08:10PM
So, after a lot of hard work by a number of individual across the industry, I am happy to say that on June 3rd, the FC-BB-5 working group of T11 has completed its work and unanimously approved a final standard …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 04, 2009 at 06:25PM
Today at Cisco’s Partner Summit, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and other Cisco executives are discussing the company’s strategy to accelerate go-to-market plans for unified computing with channel partners. The strategy includes new IT Career Certifications in Data Center Management, new …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 03, 2009 at 09:59AM
Since our initial announcement of the Cisco UCS, there has been a great deal of interest, skepticism, and speculation about this new platform. Though the system won’t start shipping to customers until the end of June, Cisco IT has had …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 02, 2009 at 06:08PM
I had a good chat with a customer the other day about our Cisco UCS solution—they are very intrigued and are bringing them in-house to evaluate. As I was wrapping up, someone asked me an interesting question—they see UCS as …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 02, 2009 at 11:39AM
In the next in our series of mini-interviews with Nexus 1000V customer, we have thoughts from Olivier Parcollet, IT Architect at SETAO. Those of you who went to VMworld Europe might have seen Olivier join Ed Bugnion during his keynote. …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on June 01, 2009 at 01:51PM
In recent conversations, a couple of customers have asked me why we made the commitment to invest in developing the Cisco Nexus 1000V. Basically, they were wondering why Cisco and VMware would spend the time and resources to create a …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 29, 2009 at 03:12PM
One of the goals of Data Center 3.0 is to shift the approach for building data center infrastructure and deploy it in a more targeted and granular fashion to make sure budget spend is used more efficiently. One of the …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 27, 2009 at 10:37PM
John Manville, VP for IT for the Network and Data Center Services organization, will be on IPTV tomorrow discussing the production implementation of the Cisco Unified Computing System in our data centers. The event is tomorrow (May 27) at 11am …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 26, 2009 at 10:34AM
As I have often note in my customer briefings, getting a handle on power and cooling issues in the data center is dependent on the proverbial three-legged stool: energy-efficient facilities, energy-efficient products, and getting educated on designing/implementing/operating energy efficient data …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 22, 2009 at 08:17AM
Yes, its true, Cisco virtual networking goodness is available to one and all. To kick things off, we have worked with the fine folks at VMW to put together a 60-day eval program so you can check things out in …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 21, 2009 at 07:20AM
At Interop yesterday, Doug Gourlay, Cisco VP Data Center 3.0 Solutions, discussed the status of the standards for next-generation ethernet. In this video he talks about how Cisco customers can get better performance, better density, lower power, and longer distance …Read more.
Posted by Didier Rombaut on May 21, 2009 at 05:00AM
OK, so the title is meant to be a bit ambiguous, as much a question as it is a statement—I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I have been pondering this a bit since I am prepping for my …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 20, 2009 at 12:51PM
Our ConC TechMinute celebrity, Sidney Morgan discusses the deployment of Cisco UCS in our production environment and how it has improved power efficiency in our Richardson data center. You can also listen to Sidney discuss how we are integrating the …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 18, 2009 at 11:23PM
Just a quick heads-up—we have quite a few interesting things going on at EMCworld this week, including a session by our Cisco-on-Cisco TechMinute celebrity Sidney Morgan. Listen to Sidney give a brief update on our sessions. Sidney’s session is “Case …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 18, 2009 at 05:17PM
Since Cisco first introduced the concept of oversubscribed Fibre Channel modules in the storage networking industry with the MDS 9000 Family, there has been quite a bit of confusion between oversubscribed and blocking architectures, often incorrectly using the two terms …Read more.
Posted by Paolo Perazzo on May 14, 2009 at 09:18AM
With our Cisco Nexus 1000V beta wrapping up, I had a chance to ping a couple of our customers about their experiences testing the Cisco Nexus 1000V/vSphere combo in their environments. The excerpt is from Julien Mousqueton, who is the …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 11, 2009 at 09:42AM
Here is the second video video walk-through for the Cisco UCS Manager. In this one, we dig into the service profiles a bit more and then talk a bit about the use models for the Unified Computing System XML API. …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 01, 2009 at 12:23PM
OK, so it took a bit longer than I planned, but here is the first of a two-part walk-through of Cisco UCS Manager with Brian Schwarz. As context, I would also suggest you check out the prior two posts on …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 01, 2009 at 10:27AM
The fine folks at our ESE team are putting on what looks to be a very cool session on implementing security in the data center. The session is based on the information of the latest Cisco Validated Design and will …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on May 01, 2009 at 10:11AM
These days, there seems to be a steady parade of announcements from some of our competitors signing deals with some of our partners. Somewhere in the announcement there is inevitably a proclaimation something along the lines of “now, customers have …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on April 29, 2009 at 03:59PM
Many industry pundits have missed the proverbial forest for the trees this week. IBM’s recent announcement in which they detail the broadening of their joint Brocade/Foundry GTM strategy has been misinterpreted as an anti-Cisco strategy. In reality, it’s an anti-HP …Read more.
Posted by Bill Marozas on April 29, 2009 at 10:28AM
It seems that is it suddenly popular to attack Cisco on the topic on investment protection—that we are the “rip and replace guys”. It’s Friday—I am in a good mood, so I’ll offer up a piece of friendly advice to …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on April 24, 2009 at 10:04AM
So, before we dig into CEE (Convergence Enhanced Ethernet), I have a quick quiz for you: take a look at the two pictures below and make note of the differences: Ready? OK, back to the topic at hand…. So, one …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on April 16, 2009 at 01:26PM
We just posted an a new document to the website that provides further detail on virtual networking with the N1KV. A key part of the doc is a comparison of the existing VMW vSwitch vs the new VMW vDS and …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on April 15, 2009 at 12:25PM
One of the aspects of the Cisco Unified Computing launch that I enjoyed was the opportunity to meet and work with a whole new group of really smart people. Out of that, I had the opportunity to record some podcasts …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 31, 2009 at 07:01PM
With this latest installment, Doug Alger discusses how the Cisco Unified Computing System will impact strategies for cabling, power and cooling. The conversation then moves onto a broader discussion of addressing power and cooling requirements in a age of dynamic …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 31, 2009 at 01:49PM
When discussing unified fabric with customers these days, the conversation is increasingly shifting from “why?” to “how?” Here are some of the slides I will use to brief customers on the “how”. The important thing to note is that the …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 31, 2009 at 01:24AM
Here is a great technical session presented by Guy Brunsdon of VMware. It starts with a good foundation on networking in a virtual machine environment, followed by a discussion of the virtual distributed switch and the Cisco Nexus 1000V. For …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 27, 2009 at 03:06PM
I thought I would switch gears a bit and touch on one of the other pillars of the data center. Our storage environment continues to be a great story to tell and continues to be a source of interest with …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 26, 2009 at 11:11PM
Doug and I were having an interesting conversation the other day, which I thought was worth sharing…. In 1965 Gordon Moore postulated in a paper that transistor density would double approximately every two years. We’ve heard people question why networking …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 24, 2009 at 06:38PM
So, to get a bit further into the management of the UCS in a heterogeneous environment, I went to the source and did a quick interview with Brian Schwarz, who is Product Manager focused on UCS Manager in the Server …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 23, 2009 at 03:16PM
As I have noted, virtualization introduces a couple of distinct challenges that directly impact its ultimately scalability as a solution. While virtualization offers a number of compelling benefits, it does introduce increased operational complexity. Because it is simple to add …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 23, 2009 at 02:57PM
In this installment, our fearless data center architect Doug Alger discusses how Cisco IT handles equipment that needs side-to-side airflow. As to why we need side-to-side airflow in the first place, check out this recent interview with Doug Gourlay. On …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 20, 2009 at 09:43AM
One of the objectives for our blog is to add some new perspectives, so you will be seeing some new faces—some permanently and some guest bloggers. So, I am very pleased to get this effort kicked off with a guest …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 18, 2009 at 07:13PM
Now that the dust has settled and everyone has had a chance to digest the Unified Computing System announcements a bit, I see a couple of salient points—well, I see more, but only have time to blog about a couple …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 18, 2009 at 12:18PM
Although we just announces the Cisco Unified Computing System yesterday, we already have it in production here at Cisco. We have a number of web, database and legal apps running on it, most of which you cannot access, except for …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 17, 2009 at 02:55PM
It has been hard sitting by and watching the rumor mill go into overdrive but we are finally ready to take the wraps off our innovative new system for the data center … Cisco’s Unified Computing System. Cisco talked previously …Read more.
Posted by Elizabeth McNichols on March 16, 2009 at 08:03AM
Sometimes we can’t get everything we want to say in a press release, like our recent Cisco Unified Computing announcement. This is a collection of a few points that seem to get lost in translation/distillation that we wanted to ensure …Read more.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay on March 16, 2009 at 07:30AM
I sometimes wonder when someone copies some of the things I’m doing, whether I should be flattered that someone is inspired so much that they would do such a thing? Or I should be upset about it? Personally I don’t …Read more.
Posted by Kash Shaikh on March 15, 2009 at 08:54PM
As our Unified Computing System story unfolds tomorrow, I am sure there will be no shortage of expert commentary that says Cisco has gone off the reservation—in fact, I would venture that several of these pieces have already been written …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on March 15, 2009 at 05:31PM
So, I am a big picture kinda guy, for better or for worse, and, while there are a number of really smart folks working on the plumbing behind cloud computing, from a go-to-market perspective, I have been wondering about what …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on February 20, 2009 at 01:04PM
So, a year ago, we kicked off a little party with the launch of the Nexus 7000 and NX-OS. As you can see, we have been busy year—we have fleshed out the Nexus portfolio with the Nexus 5000 and 1000V, …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on January 27, 2009 at 12:25AM
As Padmasree stated in her blog post on Unified Computing, “Yes.” We are in the middle of a series of disruptions, both technological and economic. On the technology front there is an increasing shift to using virtualization technologies to extend …Read more.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay on January 20, 2009 at 11:30AM
While I have avoided a “2009 predictions” post, I will say I think the coming year will be a fun time to be in the infrastructure business. Its been quite a while since infrastructure was cool, but as Geva Perry …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on January 04, 2009 at 05:25PM
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 …Read more.
Posted by Douglas Gourlay on December 16, 2008 at 05:17PM
Quite a few years ago, when we we positioning the concept of the intelligent network, we had a slide that showed how features moved from servers or dedicated hardware to the the network over time. The trigger was usually when …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on December 02, 2008 at 11:20PM
We had Robert Scoble swing by the Cisco DNA lab yesterday to learn a little bit more about data center 3.0 and talk about what we can do in the near term to help customers deal with the repercussions of …Read more.
Posted by Omar Sultan on November 26, 2008 at 07:52AM
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