Kapil Bakshi
Chief Solutions Architect, Cisco Systems Inc.

The data center networking platform is the core competency of Cisco. Around that, there are innovations such as Unified Computing System, which offers a converged view of storage, compute and network aspects, and which provides the basis for a virtualized platform that will be the precursor of optimized data centers.

Unified fabric is where you take the network sprawl of local area networks, storage area networks and so on, and combine them into a single wire and make it easy to provision and manage network services, which takes a lot of the cost out of the equation. That’s very important for an optimized and agile data center.

Then we understand that you need have to have some kind of standardized building blocks in order to get to an optimized data center. As part of that we are bringing some key building blocks, not just based on our technologies but also those from our best-of-breed partners that have been pre-tested and pre-integrated.

More importantly, we see that there is a whole value chain that different parts of the ecosystem will provide in optimizing a data center, and we contribute many parts of that value chain at the infrastructure and platform level. And, in turn, we enable all the other parts of the value chain that we don’t contribute to but have some influence on, such as software applications and virtualized applications.

Finally, we also bring key cloud technologies and secure cloud services, including contributing to key cloud standards for further enabling data center optimization.