Cisco Systems has a number of projects under way designed to offer businesses solutions that will enable them to run their data centers more efficiently, according to Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior. Speaking at the Cisco Live event, Warrior says Cisco is changing from a product-driven company to a solution-driven one, and such Cisco products as UCS, TelePresence, WebEx and the Flip video camera will be key players in these solutions.
Cisco Systems has a number of projects under way that bring together its
myriad products to create products to help businesses get more done, more
efficiently, according to the company's CTO.
Speaking at the Cisco Live event in San Francisco
July 1, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior said
enterprises are looking to technology suppliers less for individual products
and more for offerings that bring together these products to solve particular
problems.
That move from products to solutions is a key part of Cisco's continuing
evolution, Warrior said.
One example is in the data center, where Cisco is bringing together its
Nexus family of network switches with its UCS (
Unified
Computing System) integrated infrastructure to create what Warrior called
the Nexus Data Center Pod. The solution combines the converged infrastructure
of UCS with that various features within the Nexus family, from VPNs and
firewalls to load balancing and orchestration capabilities.
Cisco has used the solution within its own IT organization, Warrior said. In
a 1-megawatt, 10,000-square-foot data center, use of the Nexus Data Center Pod
solution cut power consumption by 30 percent, cut costs in areas such as
cabling by 40 percent and cleared up enough floor space to add 50 percent more
servers. In addition, Cisco is able to run four times the number of virtual
machines that it would have in a more traditional data center.
"This is an example of how we're moving from great products to great
solutions," Warrior said.
Cisco engineers also are working on a project called MediaNet, which Warrior
described as a platform created on the network for video content, which would
include everything from user-generated video created on such devices as
Cisco's
Flip video camera to high-end, high-density professional video to real-time
video from such products as Cisco's TelePresence.
In keeping with the company's message, Warrior said video is going to be the
key application that drives the way companies do business in the future, and
that IT infrastructures will need to be able to handle the demands that will
come with video.
She also pointed to the work Cisco has done at the Dallas Cowboys' new
stadium and the new Yankee Stadium, where the company outfitted the buildings
with networking and video capabilities as well as unified communications and
digital signage.
Warrior covered familiar ground during much of her hour-long speech, echoing
what
CEO John Chambers said June 30 during his presentation. With the
convergence of technology in the data center, the growth of virtualization and
cloud computing, and the convergence of consumer and commercial technology, the
network will take on an increasingly important role, essentially becoming the
platform upon which everything else is built.
She also touched on the various factors that are driving these technological
changes, from rapid growth in the use of mobile devices-1 billion people
worldwide are accessing the Internet via mobile devices, and half of the
world's population has mobile phones-to the use of IP in sectors such as health
care, education and energy delivery through the
Smart
Grid.
Dovetailing with that theme was an announcement Cisco made earlier in the
day July 1, introducing its Smart Connected Buildings program. It's part of
Cisco's larger Smart+Connected Communities initiative, one of 30 "market
adjacencies" that Chambers outlined in his talk.
Warrior spent much of her time on stage talking about cloud computing,
saying Cisco was going to be a key player in the development of the computing
model, both for internal clouds and public clouds such as those offered by
Amazon.com and Google, as well as for hybrid clouds. Echoing her message from a
briefing June 29, she also said Cisco has no intention of competing with Amazon.com
and Google by creating its own public cloud environment.
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