IDG News Service — While Cisco Systems (CSCO) branches out into consumer electronics, video, mobile data and other areas, one of its biggest areas of focus today is enterprise data centers. The dominant LAN provider thinks the transformation of data centers through virtualization calls for new kinds of connections and a broader role for network technology and intelligence. John McCool oversees this push as senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Data Center, Switching and Services group. IDG News Service talked with McCool recently about the company's own role and its partnerships with other vendors in this arena.

IDGNS: Can you give me an update on Cisco's relationship with EMC (EMC) and VMware (VMW) around Vblox?

McCool: Let me step back a little bit and give the general context. As we start to see a lot of changes from a technology perspective and our industry moves to cloud computing -- how people are consuming technology, where they're getting information, which data center -- the need to converge a lot of these technologies is getting increasingly important. And whether we build ourself, buy technology, or partner, the ability to execute in all three of those dimensions is critical.

Vblox is one component of several areas that we've partnered with both VMware and EMC. The initial partnership with VMware, I would say, was born out of customer demand for making virtualization work and scale in data centers. They saw the promise, they were using it effectively to lower their costs, but we started to engage with VMware in areas where it was difficult to scale across the network. The network designs wouldn't let virtualization move in a large-scale way. And we made a series of investments in technologies that allowed broad-based scaling within racks of machines and across racks, and now moving from data center to data center. Vblox is a piece of the work that we've done in that context. It's about making it easier to consume and service the combination of storage, virtualization, and compute -- and network.

So, we're in the market with Vblox and pleased with the progress and moving that along. It came on the heels of our Unified Computing introduction, (where we are) quite pleased with the progress. We announced some additional customers like Taser (the maker of electronic stun devices), who's using it for a video-based application, which we think is pretty interesting.

IDGNS: It's been almost a year since the announcement of UCS (Unified Computing System). What more can you tell me about the progress on the UCS front?

Continue Reading