Integrated Infrastructure in the Data Center: a Chat with Cisco IT

Coming from the enterprise data center product side of the house, I’m always curious to hear from real-world IT practitioners what problems they wrestle with, how they think about their goals, and what keeps them up a night. At Cisco, we’re lucky to have one of the leading enterprise IT shops on the planet. And they’re not shy about sharing their opinions on what we’re doing with our products and solutions both good and bad.

So, I wanted to get IT’s perspective on one of the most critical shifts happening in the data center: customers purchasing integrated stacks or pods of hardware optimized for specific use cases and workloads. Billions of dollars worth of our UCS and Nexus systems are being consumed in this manner. Gartner and IDC refer to the shift toward integrated systems as converged or integrated infrastructure. We have a short white paper that describes this movement and Cisco’s approach.

Clearly, our IT shop doesn’t need to consume things in the same way as the broader market. But is the notion of integration still relevant? How does Cisco IT frame use cases? How does it achieve standardization of the infrastructure layer? In this video, I had the chance to ask Sidney Morgan, a distinguished engineer in IT, about all this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKD6mRYoZsA