Anant Thakar Joined Cisco in 1999 via the acquisition of Rohati Systems. He has over 25+ years of experience in product design & system architecture, primarily in data center. Vertical areas he has worked on includes networking, security, server & storage industry. Anant is currently focused Heterogeneous compute architectures for resource disaggregation, edge compute and IO scaling using optical transport. He is the chief product architect of UCS-X Series Platform. His biggest strength apart from “architecture to execution” is his constant ability to think “out side the box” to come up with solutions, with new ways to solve existing issues as well as anticipating future ones. Prior to 2009, Anant co-founded a security start up Rohati Systems in 2006. Rohati Sytems delivered a hardware based application level firewall with data path FPGAs and a purpose built lossless fabric based modular architecture. Anant was the founding engineer of Cat6K family of switches where he started as system design Engineer and later became an architect with focus on ASIC IO path, System interconnect and various Supervisor & line cards. Several of his designs are still running in Data centers across the world. Anant started his career as an R&D engineer & developed several designs in graphics/networking and processor domain. He later formed a company specializing in control and embedded system design. He has several patents in the area of system architecture , IO interconnect and thermal. In his spare time he enjoys hiking and reading on the history of civilizations.