Ravi Balakrishnan

Last week at Redhat Summit in San Francisco, Cisco Data center was well represented in speaking sessions, and solutions expo. I saw lots of traffic at our demo booth featuring Cisco ACI with OpenStack. Customers and Partners alike, showed great interest in how Cisco APIC integrates with OpenStack an…

The Best of Interop Awards for 2014 were announced today at 5.30 PM, at the Interop Theater. Cisco Nexus 9516 switch won the Best of Interop award in the Data Center category. Check out http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/expo/best-of-interop-awards.php for details To learn more about this unique produc…

Finally, Interop 2014 is around the corner and Las Vegas is heating up belying the wintry conditions as I step out of the airport. Two weeks ago, two of our flagship Cisco ACI products, Cisco Nexus 9516 and the Cisco APIC (Application Policy Infrastructure Controller) both were selected as Best of I…

The Nexus 9516 is the latest addition to the Nexus 9000 family of switches and it is already making headlines everywhere. The crowning moment came two weeks ago, when the Nexus 9516 was selected as Best of Interop 2014 finalists, in the Data Center category. Earlier the Nexus 9516 achieved grander r…

I am neither an AC Milan soccer fan nor a connoisseur of haute couture, so it will be no surprise if you wondered what I am doing in Europe’s fashion capital Milan, and that too in the middle of Milan’s wintry January. Without further ado, I will break the suspense.  Yes, I am one of the few, chosen…

If you are an open source fan, in particular GitHub, I have good news for you. Yes, we now have a Cisco Nexus 9000 community on GitHub. While many of the initial contributions were created by Cisco employees, ANYONE is allowed and in fact encouraged to participate and share code. Pull requests are m…

Last week was a memorable one for me in more ways than one. First, the unveiling of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) specifics by John Chambers and his Executive Management team via a public webcast on Nov 6. The announcement was a big success and received broad endorsement and suppo…

You must be thinking I am joking, when I say that there is an affinity between me and San Francisco Moscone center. Yes, August end, I was there for VMworld 2013 and September end I was back there again for Oracle Open world (OOW 2013). But there is more to my experiences at OOW this year, than this…

This year at VMworld, San Francisco, I had a choice, to attend either as a Visitor or as a Demo Booth staffer. I quickly chose the latter, as I could not resist getting face-time with customers! My decision proved fully justified, as I gained a lot from the discussions on the show floor. I was so bu…