Cisco's McCool sees growing data-center role

23.01.2010

The UCS system is higher powered than a single server in the large configuration, but its power consumption per virtual machine radically changes the profile. So you can reduce the number of boxes, number of connections, number of I/O, by moving multiple of these server systems down to a UCS. We've seen that even in our own designs that we've done around Nexus and UCS in our data center in Richardson (Texas). We reduced something like 4,800 cables alone.

In the past, especially before the downturn, people were building out new data centers for capacity. Huge expense in the physical shell. Hundreds of millions of dollars to build out that real estate. And I used to ask customers, when do they retrofit? And they'd say, well, we don't have time. The focus now has shifted to, "How can I better utilize the existing footprint that I have?" Our data center was a great example of that. We needed more capacity. So our design point in our data center was increasing capacity for the same physical shell, the same power footprint. We went to virtual machines to do that, so there was a dramatic increase in the number of virtual machines.