Unified Computing in the Datacenter

Mark Fulgham Vice President of Data Center Solutions for the Central Marketing Organization of Cisco, reveals how the company are focusing on a systems approach to datacenter virtualization.

Can you outline the main business challenges in the datacenter and explain how you are tackling these business challenges at Cisco?

Mark Fulgham. Cisco has focused on datacenter virtualization as the paradigm shift to address the real challenges of the CIO - why? Because it remains largely a collection of technologies that each CIO's team or their respective proxy has to design assemble and manage. Cisco began looking at systems, applications and network architectures, not just networks. We began to see the network not as plumbing, but as a platform and as the preferred vehicle for this virtualization journey. Case in point: as the virtual machine became the new atomic unit for data centers, the Cisco unified fabric was there to create the physical to virtual abstraction - simplifying infrastructure, unifying a tangle of interdependencies and converging discrete networks into one that could deliver ubiquitous connectivity and hardware location freedom.

With network, compute and virtualization platforms converged, Cisco has been able to focus efforts beyond abstraction to automation, from unified fabric to unified computing - and to a simpler architecture that extends the lifecycle of capital assets and enables more efficient, flexible and available business processes. Unified computing will move us from hardware to software provisioning of the network and the workload. Total provisioning freedom of the infrastructure will allow CIOs to focus on the data and information contained within the lines of business and decision support systems.

In a difficult business climate the IT department must accomplish more with fewer resources. How are advances in datacenter technology helping accomplish more? What are you doing in this sector?

MF. Datacenter virtualization provides us with an opportunity to sand-box and standardize physical platforms while redefining what is core and context to IT. By standardizing the HW IT infrastructure (network, compute, storage, hypervisor, management) there is huge personnel productivity to be recovered because automation can model and perform repetition and maintain trust policies for HW IT infrastructure. IT teams can focus on the SW IT infrastructure (O/S, application, database and data) as the new way of delivering IT to business because of simplified operations and amplified opportunities. Internal IT resources can evolve into a utility that responds to requests through the creation of virtual machine containers that do not require months of lead time to plan - prepare - procure and provision. Developers can easily create virtual machines and load them with applications. Managers can quickly allocate resources to meet the dynamic needs of production workloads.

What does your collaboration with Intel entail and what value does it bring for Cisco's clients?

MF. Intel and Cisco have worked closely on a shared vision for the future of enterprise IT infrastructure - the cloud - and work closely on enabling technologies. Case in point: when you look at the challenges of virtualization you will quickly see that Moore's Law is alive and well - customers are not CPU bound they are memory and I/O bound so Cisco worked very closely with Intel on their latest Xeon 5500 series 'Nehalem' architecture to take advantage of memory expansion capabilities allowing for more memory per chipset to address large memory footprints as well as accommodate more memory per virtual machine.

What can we expect to see from Cisco in the coming 12 to 24 months?

MF. Simply stated a systems approach to datacenter virtualization - we want to help our customer by developing turnkey systems that reduce the need for buying individual components and then integrating them into a system to service business applications. We want to bring to market virtual blocks of HW IT functionality, which are available at the right price and the right size.

Challenges of the datacenter

Every business event generates an IT transaction in the data center. Cisco has listened very carefully to the real challenges of CIOs today as they look to tomorrow:

• How to bring together competing server, storage and network teams
• How to open up existing data center silos
• How to break free of endless location, hardware, provisioning and business process constraints
• How to retire business risk, increase business agility and align technology with business and financial realities

BIO

Mark Fulgham is Vice President of Data Center Solutions for the Central Marketing Organization of Cisco. Focused on Cisco's Unified Computing and Data Center Virtualization programs, Mark is responsible for product marketing and field enablement, partner marketing, data center architecture, and processes and operations.