Cisco may not be the first company that springs to mind when you consider data center transformation and cooling but the networking giant is moving into many aspects of the data center business that it is not normally associated with.
Phil Andrews, Business Development Director, Cisco Datacenter Europe, told DatacenterDynamics Focus how the company is now looking at the evolution of the data center and how it will develop to handle areas such as virtualisation and cloud computing.
"The first thing people need to understand is that you don't change your data center overnight. If cloud computing is where you want to be - your whole data center scale changes. The space in the data center is scaled to the number of servers. Virtualisation means less less machinery, less power, fewer assets, less but smarter networking. For example if all your servers are 10% utilised - then your data center is ten times bigger than you need.."
Cisco is not suggesting that a wholesale rip and replace approach is the only way forward.
"The need is to have an assessment - once that is done they can move forwards. You don't have to do it all at once. If you start the journey, in three or four years you can have a virtualised data center."
"There is no doubt that virtualisation will put pressure on the network and we are looking at power efficiency and the impact of the physical architecture of the data center. Our research showed a strong need for services so we introduced assessment services for users so they can reduce power bills."
This is a short extract from an interview which took place at DatacenterDynamics London 2008.
Look out for the full video interview which will be available soon on www.datacenterdynamics.com