Cisco's data center guru talks direction, strategy

As a 13 year Cisco veteran, John McCool, senior vice president and General Manager of Cisco's Data Center Switching and Services Group, has seen a boatload of change. He is responsible for the strategy, engineering and marketing of Cisco's family of enterprise Ethernet switching solutions, including the Catalyst series, the Nexus data center switches and the MDS storage area network line. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix and Managing Editor Jim Duffy recently got McCool on the phone to find out what he sees coming down the pike.

You face renewed competition on many fronts and the core technologies continue to evolve. How do you see the market changing?

It has always been a highly competitive market, and we have tried to set the pace through innovation focused on convergence of solutions over IP and the development of services on top of that. That strategy has not wavered at all. For example, we integrated layer 3 technologies with layer 2 and showed the value to the marketplace. And we showed how we could integrate TDM networks with voice over IP and led in that architectural innovation. What has changed are the frontiers. There is the convergence of compute and storage transport over IP. There is the focus on the integration of wired and wireless technologies over switching fabrics, and the integration of security that comes with that. So, there are constantly new ways to apply innovation.

Data center network brawl

HP and 3Com have stepped up their competitive efforts, both of them pushing a value story, and Juniper is making more noise in the data center, what kind of market pressure is all of this putting on you guys?

We've seen competitors ebb and flow in terms of their focus on this marketplace. Certainly we see a lot of competition that is strictly focused on price, and while that is one important part of competition, I would submit that value has a lot to do with your ability to simplify customer operations.

Look at the longevity of our 6500. We have had multiple product transitions within that platform. Customers running large networks have all three generations of that product and have a consistent set of operations across them, have the ability to integrate services, and that brings tremendous value.

How sensitive are customers to pricing, particularly in this economic environment?

Companies crunched for capital begin to look at near term cap-ex and sometimes lose focus on long term op-ex. We've seen more focus in the low end of our product lines, the Nexus 2000 and the Nexus 4000, but as things start to pick up we begin to see more of the normal pattern, where people are looking at the network broadly and looking at integrated systems that are going to drive their productivity and growth.

How do you see the evolution of virtualization and the emergence of this cloud stuff changing data center network design?

If you look what we did with our Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus, we placed a big bet about four years ago that virtualization was going to be a very significant market transition and I think we called it right. It would have been easy to just continue the evolution of our 6500 family, but we felt strongly that we needed to look at how compute evolves to deal with virtualization, and how the network fabric and compute become very integral.