Cisco’s global CTO Padmasree Warrior said her company has a big lead over server makers in integrating compute network and virtualisation.

Speaking today at the company’s Cisco Live conference in London, she said: “With respect to integrating compute network and virtualisation we’re probably two to two and half years ahead."

Warrior was referring to the company’s unified fabric and unified compute strategy and its best known component the Unified Computing System – the firm's entry into the server market. “With UCS – our goal was not to build a server. Our goal was integrate virtualisation and networking because this was the way we saw the shift in the data center. So I think if we look at the future, more of the integration has to be with the management and orchestration, there is only so much efficiency you can drive at the hardware layer. Unified management – that to me is the next opportunity that we have.”

She said cisco’s unified data center approach was based on high performance, operational efficiency, storage convergence and flexible deployment.

Warrior told DatacenterDynamics that UCS had quickly gained traction in the market: “We have a $1.2bn run rate in UCS. We are the number three blade vendor world-wide – so the traction we’ve got is absolutely phenomenal – half in cloud deployments for public and private cloud providers and the half is in traditional data centers. So this platform has a lot of advantages in lowering costs, speeding up deployment times and the outcomes are quantifiable by our customers.”

She said Cisco’s unifed data center center architecture promised 30% less infrastructure costs, 30% greater application performance, 90% less deployment time, double the connectivity and 60% less power and cooling.

“This is a game changing technology within the data center,” she said. “Integrating compute with unified fabric with our switching architecture across Lan and San and you have the same operating system - Nexus OS - both on MVS and connecting back to UCS.”

“A lot of compute vendors cannot do this but they don’t have the strength in switching to bring together the unified fabric with unified compute so it is not about building servers but actually bringing them together,” she said.