It is great when the chief sales guy feels pretty good about the innovation a company delivers enough to blog about it. It gets even better when customers feel good about the innovation and value that a company like Cisco brings, to get up in front of the camera and share the benefits they are deriving.
Such customer confidence comes from trust. In the case of Cisco, we have earned this trust over decades, providing our customers not just with the best networking technology but by providing the right support model, the lowest TCO and simply the best investment protection in the industry.
This has been borne out many times even as we’ve led numerous industry transitions - from enabling the ubiquity of Ethernet and IP; driving the voice, video and data inflection points, and the more recent trends around data center, virtualization and cloud.
Speaking of inflection points - over the past three years - we are leading perhaps the biggest networking transition in history, as we introduce the Nexus switching and NX-OS platforms into the data center and make it a foundational element for fabric-based infrastructure. In just over three years, we have over 19,000 NX-OS based customers with a sustained #1 market leadership across a variety of categories including revenue and port share. As the chart below depicts, we’re nearly 3X the 10GbE revenue of all our competitors combined! The 10GbE port shipments are equally strong compared to the rest of the industry.
Needless to say, all this has made the job for our competition much harder; to keep up with Cisco’s pace of innovation has not been an easy task.
I’m not a car person and I don’t worry too much about what’s under the hood. That means that I’m just a car user, I only want to turn the ignition key and drive. In the Data Center world, the server team is typically a user of the network. Server guys don’t want to know how the network is implemented. They just want their VLANs to extend to the whole network so that they can connect their devices with no constraint, without having to worry about high availability, risk containment, link provisioning… network stuff. That’s precisely what FabricPath is designed to offer them: a network that looks like a single switch, the simplest networking entity. This “Fabric” offers efficient any-to-any connectivity with high bandwidth and low latency, all without having to understand how it works.
Figure 1
Of course, this user perspective is an abstraction. The following Figure 2 represents an example of the physical topology of the network, a Clos fabric, typical in Data Center environments. Note that this could just as well be a ring, a star, or even a network distributed across two sites. FabricPath turns an arbitrary topology into a Fabric and does not lock you into a particular model.
Over the last few days, I’ve been listening to some interesting conversations on the topic of “fabric” in the data center. To be honest, one of the common questions I get is if there is anything materially different about “Fabric” (our Data Center Fabric or anyone else’s), or is it merely the latest buzzword from bored marketing geeks. From what I have seen, many of the companies throwing around the term “fabric” are referring only to transport and are usually tying it to a specific product or technology. On these two points, Cisco’s view of fabric markedly differs. Read More »
What do you have when you combine over 20,000 IT professionals, the desert and gaming? No, not 20,000 broke, sweaty nerds…you’ve got two great conferences! Next week the city on the strip, Las Vegas Nevada, will be the host of Interop and EMC World. Both events will provide attendees with plenty of updates on the future of networking, storage, compute and of course cloud. Cisco will be present at both events here are some highlights: Read More »
Cisco recently shipped its one millionth Nexus 10Gb Ethernet port, bringing the total number of Nexus ports in customer production environments to more than 7,000,000. We have also surpassed 10,000 NX-OS customers and neared 4,000 Unified Computing Systems. Wow. Good times.
The linkage and capabilities continue to build and this show covers the next step on our very mature convergence storyline adding scale and intelligence to the mix.
