Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

(Editor's Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. To view TMCnet's entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our video news home page.)

Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMCnet's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had the chance to interview Force10's Senior Director of Product Marketing Kevin Wade (News - Alert).

Wade said they've had an active couple of months leading up to the show. "We really honed and focused our message for our data center customer base," he said. "For us, we're all about data center infrastructure. We've had a series of important announcements for the company leading up to the show."

Wade said they'd been concentrating on the show, over the past few months, noting that there are some topics that are important to their data center customers.

He mentioned their open automation initiative they'd announced a month before the show. "Open automation is our foray into automating the data center network infrastructure, in cooperation with some key ecosystem partners, to enable the network component of the infrastructures to be more dynamic and responsive to resource needs."

He gave as an example if a hypervisor or V switch component of the network is needing to move a virtualized server from one pod of the data center network to another, "we have hooks into our switching fabric that enable the data center network Ethernet switches to dynamically respond and then provide more resources to meet that request, to move the resources from one location over to another dynamically."

And when asked what he'd seen as far as the economic conditions over the last six months to a year, as far as buyers and spending went, Wade said data center customers had less of a protracted decline than perhaps some other vertical markets. "I would guess that is directly tied to the fact that there certainly aren't fewer people using online applications, more things like software as a service or cloud computing applications."

He noted that there is certainly no lessening in demand for bandwidth, so his company has "more or less a built-in growth engine."