Some practical information about ‘cisco’… A commentary from an expert within the field…
Recently, I started teaching the Cisco DCUFI (Data Centre Unified Infrastructure) course, which primarily focuses on the Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 platforms. The demand for the course is currently high and this usually reflects the demand for the product itself in the market. My evidence is purely anecdotal but it would appear that Cisco Nexus is currently hot.
One of the questions I ask the delegates is “what is driving you to purchase Cisco Nexus”? I get a variety of answers but the most popular seem to be 10G Ethernet, VDC (Virtual Device Contexts) and vPC (Virtual Port Channel). People tend to see Fabric Path, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualisation) as interesting but not immediately relevant.
In my first series of blogs I’m hoping to discuss the virtues (or otherwise) of the Cisco Nexus feature set. However, today I want to discuss the drivers that may not be directly related to the feature set itself. For example, what role does the awesome Cisco marketing machine play and is demand related to hardware lifecycles, new data centre environments and the proliferation of cloud services, because after-all, one man’s cloud is another man’s infrastructure.
For all Cisco’s wonderful technology the thing that almost impresses me the most is their marketing. Even though I should know better, I frequently find myself taken in by the “Borderless Human Network of Things”. In this case Cisco’s Unified Data Centre is our “path to a world of many clouds” and at the heart of that Unified Data Centre is Nexus and UCS.
However much you are dazzled by the marketing, data centre is certainly a key technology area. For several years now an army of Cisco SE’s and account managers have been knocking at our virtual doors, arranging briefings and comfy Telepresence sessions to tell us about the new revolutionary data centre switching platform that is Cisco Nexus. So when you need to retire your old work-horse 6500, deploy a greenfield data centre or build a cloud, then it’s time to walk that “path to the world of many clouds” and buy Cisco Nexus.
I have no doubt that there are many customer out there that have invested in Nexus and but for the intervention of Cisco sales and marketing team they could have remained on Cisco 6500, 4500 or 3750’s for another hardware lifecycle without too many problems. However, I also do not doubt that over the coming two to three years many of the features new and exclusive to the Cisco Nexus platform will be become as standard as STP and GRE.
Note: This information is purely based on my own personal experience rather than extensive market research. As a result, I am happy to receive corrections, comments or just different opinions. So feel free to contact me on any of the following.
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