Interop: 5 Questions For Cisco's Jayshree Ullal

For the past year, Cisco Systems has been hammering home its Data Center 3.0 vision. The San Jose, Calif.-based vendor has released a host of products that for the data center, from the new line of Nexus data center switches to a new fibre channel over Ethernet offering.

Shortly before her keynote presentation at Interop Las Vegas 2008, ChannelWeb caught up with Jayshree Ullal, Cisco's senior vice president of data center, switching and services. Ullal talked about how customers and solution providers can prepare data centers for the new influx of sophisticated applications, like video, and discussed how over the past couple of years Cisco has "gone from wanna be to we're here to be" in the data center.

Cisco has made several key announcements in the data center lately and the increase of applications; what do you plan to discuss this year at Interop?

I'm going to talk about how the enterprise is transforming and one of the transformation aspects of the enterprise is we're moving from siloed applications on the network to increasingly understanding how new applications like video and Web 2.0 can interact not just with the network in a loosely coupled fashion but really tightly with it. That's a key piece and video is an example of that. Much like we did with unified communications where we really focused on the right power over Ethernet and quality of service required to run it, video requires us to do a number of things: How to look deeper into packets to understand the type of video traffic; how to enable end-to-end predictable latency. Video traffic consumes lots of bandwidth it can be anywhere from a few megabits to 20 megabits, but making sure you can send that information reliably so when you see it visually there's no jitter is very fundamental.

As video and these bandwidth intensive, sophisticated applications are moving into the data center, what do customers need to do to get ready for this?

Three things: First you have to future proof the network to have the right bandwidth capacity, performance, etc. Performance is not just bandwidth and capacity, but latency. The video streams need to be appropriately prioritized. You may have a 10 gigabit pipe, but if you're sending a large database application and you're not really putting the focus on video then you really haven't appropriately created the right virtual main for video. The right level of pipes, latency and jitter is important. That's one.

The second is recognizing the video application. What we've done in Cisco and a lot of our switches, the Catalyst 6500 is a good example, is built the right packet inspection capabilities so we can identify video streams. When you have this kind of network based application recognition you can say ok here's my video stream and identify and give it the best choice of path across the switch. It's not just providing the bandwidth but providing the right path for that bandwidth.

The third thing is, not all video is the same. You can have very high-end TelePresence video, you can have desktop video and digital surveillance. The ability to adapt your video streams from being static to interactive to highly scalable means you have to have a platform that can deal with few flows to millions of flows, especially when you look at a large service provider network running across enterprises. This is becoming more and more important because when you look at enterprises today it's not one size fits all. More and more the enterprises really are about software as a service and the ability to run multiple applications including video.

These Web 2.0 applications allow you to not just accelerate packets and protocols but in many cases accelerate the network sessions as well. You can look deep enough into the packet and look at if it is an HTTP session or a URL session and accelerate it that way. That's the beauty of what you're seeing with the new generation of enterprises. Not only are you moving bits fast, but you're actually moving the application associated bits faster. So you have to distinguish between a dedicated video stream and also the reliable data applications you want to run and make sure you can do these types of things.

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