"In the longer term is automated storage, computing and network services," he said, adding it is about end-to-end delivery and should be available commercially in one to two years in the form of a service-oriented data center.

Cisco has about 11,148 square meters of data center space around the world, 10,000 servers running a mixture of Linux, Unix and Windows, and four petabytes of storage capacity. Between six and seven megawatts of power is required to keep the data centers running.

One of Christensen's key directives was to increase storage utilization, which five years ago was growing at 60 to 70 percent a year, but utilization was low. The company entered into the SAN fiber channel space to be able to connect everything across data centers. Since then it has doubled storage utilization from 35 to 70 percent.

Cisco uses EMC storage and virtualization software from VMware to maintain high levels of utilization. It has also moved information from direct-attached storage to SAN architectures.

"Servers at Cisco in the past had their own hard disks, but now they are diskless," he said. "With the next generation of storage virtualization we are able to provide easier data tiering."