Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers, company officials said at a Cisco customer event this week.
“Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center, switching and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.
Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making data center resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move, McCool said. Cisco itself was faced with a “$100 million server” issue – it needed the server but didn’t have enough room for it in a current data center and faced an expensive build out of a new facility just to house it.
But virtualization let Cisco pocket that stash. Virtualizing its data centers reduced its cable plant by 4,800 cables, McCool said, made room for 50% more physical servers and increased virtual machine capacity fourfold.
