Interop: 5 Questions For Cisco's Jayshree Ullal

Much like unified communications, data center is really a practice it's not just a product. We now have a whole portfolio of products, everything from Nexus unified fabric, Catalyst switches, storage MDS switches, high-performance compute with either infiniband or Ethernet low latency switches, security with TrustSec to bring in the data center encryption and firewalling capabilities and all the management and orchestration pieces.

What our channel partners are now equipped to do is: We have the vision, the data center 3.0 vision with consolidation, virtualization and orchestration. We have a rich product pipeline What we need is close partnership with the partners to really deploy this portfolio of products and build a data center practice. There are data centers the way they are constructed today which is much more inside and there are next-generation data centers where the network is truly the platform for orchestrating the compute, storage, all the different machines and applications. Our partners are a very vital piece of this. We are kind of the fabric. Our partners can make our fabric come alive by connecting it to the right storage machines, the server machines and the applications and becoming the systems integrators.

What do you see as the challenges the channel and customers face with this data center strategy?

A lot of it is education, training and practical deployment scenarios. The vision is very high, most of us get graded a nine out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 at Cisco for having the vision. The product pipeline with all of the new product introductions we've made in the last year is equally high. The biggest challenges lie in the deployment scenarios. How many of these things can you do in a greenfield data center versus a legacy data center that you may not have enough freedom of rotation, you don't have the real estate, you don't have the power and you don't have the budget. There are at least four or five aspects to a data center consolidation, virtualization, security, application delivery and high availability; in a greenfield data center you may be able to tackle all of them. In an existing data center you may only be able to pick one of them and do it right. Making those trade-offs are what's the hardest issue in an existing versus a new data center and how do I go tackle and insert in a situation where there's a lot of moving parts already is probably the greatest challenge and opportunity.

When partners and customers are going to be deploying these next-generation data centers, what's the one thing they need to know when evaluating their data center strategy? There's a lot of new technology there and a lot of new applications, what do they need to know?

There's a physical aspect of how large is the data center and the power and cooling. There's a facilities aspect comes in first. The second is, what are they trying to service, what is the level of compute capacity and storage capacity and once they can profile the class of machines and the total amount of capacity then they'll have a much better idea of how much of a foundation of a network do they build. It's much like constructing a house. If you know how many floors you have in the house, which is equivalent to the storage and computing capacity, then you can go and decide what the foundation is. Then the applications, which are more like the faucets, the bells and the drapes and things like that are equally important today more than ever. Before we just put the infrastructure in and said the applications come later, today you have to pay a lot more attention to are these are database applications, are they Web 2.0 applications, are they video applications, are they file applications, are they legacy mainframe applications and treat the appropriately. The beauty is many of these applications work much more tightly with the network than they used to and don't require a lot of middle ware or specific consultants of the past. Consolidation both of physical facilities and the network, virtualization, who needs what and what capacity in the network, in storage, computing; and automation of the applications are the three hot buttons they really have to pay attention to.