I cornered Doug Gourlay Senior Director of Product Marketing of Cisco’s Datacenter Business Unit, at the Infrastructure 2.0 event to answer my question about what he means when he says “The Modernization of the Datacenter”.

Question (John Furrier): What do you say to all the skeptics who say that you’re promoting the modernization of the datacenter because you’re in that business and that it really isn’t a problem? Is this just virtualization or is there another issue?

Answer (Doug Gourlay): It’s absolutely a systems approach. There are multiple factors. Lets take Moore’s law for instance which has proven true over the past 30 years.…

I had a chance to meet with Doug Gourlay, Senior Director of Cisco’s Datacenter Business Unit, to ask him about what he thinks of Infrastructure 2.0.

Very interesting response.  I have a few more segments:  Modernization of the Data Center and What Cisco thinks of the phrase “Moving up the stack”.

To view the entire Cisco event in video you can go here - Click here for the Cisco Infrastructure 2.0 event.

Enjoy the video (less than 2 mins).

Here is the press release from the Infoblox and Cisco event that I went to yesterday. I got some good video from Cisco on their ‘moving up the stack’ views and what ‘modernize your datacenter means’.. Doug Gourley was on the panel and I had a chance to talk to him after. I was impressed with Cisco guys Doug Gourley and Omar Sultan both are active bloggers at Cisco. I was impressed with their social outreach on doing some collaborative blogging together. I’ll have that video up tomorrow.

Meanwhile here’s the text from the Edge DNS solutions from Cisco that now includes…

Here is an opinion piece written by John Chambers CEO of Cisco.  Talk about a vision for Broadband no better to post on Broadband Developments.

President-elect Barack Obama’s ambitious economic recovery plan has a goal to create 3 million American jobs in the next two years. Broadband is a part of the answer.

Broadband has the potential to transform our country. It will create jobs in the growth sectors of our economy — jobs that are driving the collaboration and interaction economy. Obama deserves our full support as he looks to revitalize our economy. An economic stimulus package that focuses on infrastructure…

News of Nortel’s bankruptcy filing hit the news yesterday.  No one is really surprised.
First thoughts, you can bet that giants like Cisco and Avaya will be courting some Nortel customers.  The truth of it is, Nortel while they have some great products – was not run well.   Hopefully this status allows them to have time to regroup.

But honestly, after their peak in 99-2000 it has all been downhill.  This is hardly a surprise to many.  From the dotcom downturn, to the bogus earning scandal in 2003, and an inability to turn it around for the last several years, this appears to…

Reposted from my Furrier.org blog.  Network World is reporting that Cisco has done deal with Infoblox for managing DNS at the edge. In enterprise speak this is about the branch office - in tech speak this is about intelligent addressing and control of the edge. Infoblox vNIOS™ software for Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) empowers branch offices by automating core network services, providing the performance benefits of local service delivery with unparalleled resiliency and centralized visibility while reducing branch network capital and operating expenses.

Here is Yankee group perspective worth noting on this Cisco Infoblox announcement…“Remember the ‘Trapper Keeper?’ That’s what Cisco’s…

I will be blogging this Infoblox event this coming week its a discussion around the Cloud Computing and Dynamic Infrastructure or Infrastructure 2.0.  Here is Cisco blog post talking about the upcoming Cisco event with Infoblox.

If you’re interested in attending click on this link.

The core network services (DNS, DHCP, RADIUS, TFTP, etc.) that are the foundation for branch office networks carrying data, voice, and video services on a converged network can now be viewed and managed in real-time from a single console, with powerful IP address management (IPAM), logging and reporting.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, will become part of Sun’s Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

This is an interesting announcement because cloud computing is very “cloudy” in that it’s very ‘hot’ right now but there are some major security and reliabiity issues with cloud computing.  Just this week Amazon crashed my server on a project and we lost all of our code - we have backup…

VMWare is adding a new executive to the stable - Tod Nielsen.  This on the heals of Diane Greene being forced out.

VMware Inc., (VMW: NYSE) the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced today the appointment of Tod Nielsen to the newly created role of Chief Operating Officer. Nielsen will report directly to President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz.

Nielsen, 43, joins VMware from Borland Software Corporation where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer since November 2005.  Prior to Borland, Nielsen held several key executive management positions at leading software companies including Microsoft,…

Cisco has a great blog post about their 2009 predictions and it’s very upbeat. Although Cisco is aiming to be a household brand, they are the 800 pound gorilla position in the enterprise.

Ethernet and IP are remarkably resilient technologies and they can both take a lot of abuse, but there enough concurrent pressures in the data center right now (i.e. operational complexity, scaling, virtualization, power/cooling) that attention is shifting back to infrastructure.  As Jon Oltsik recently pointed out “…these core services have been a virtually ignored kludge leading to unplanned downtime, security vulnerabilities, and manual operations…”

Gregory Ness lays out why virtualized, dynamic…