Cisco had several announcements to make at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Soni Jiandani, Senior VP at Cisco met with John Furrier, Found of SiliconAngle.com and Dave Vellante, Co-Founder of Wikibon to share some details. The first announcement was that Cisco has won the VMmark benchmark award on their UCS (Unified Computing System) platform for the second consecutive year. UCS is their premier consolidated infrastructure, bringing together computer networking and virtualization. In their next key announcement, Cisco planned to reveal a new protocol which was co-developed with VMware and other industry partners: virtual extensible LANs, also known as VXLANs. Jiandani explained how this will enable them to offer virtual applications the ability to have the security and the mobility from private clouds onto the public cloud. VXLAN also offers the scalability and security capabilities for the virtual applications. The third announcement is how Cisco will provide automation capabilities for the server and networking administrators while respecting the operational boundaries. She added, "But in this world of cloud we want to drive more and more automation . . . into our respective platforms and tied into integration with VCloud Director." Furrier asked Jiandani to speak about some problematic areas that need some improvement, such as performance, availability, mobility, and security, and how Cisco is addressing these issues. Jiandani responded, "The key here, as an industry, is to come together on the specific problems that need to be solved around scalability, security, performance, as well as manageability. With open standards, you will prevent vendor lock-ins, and also as a user, will have the opportunity to retain the investments you have in place while conducting this journey on movements toward the cloud." Jiandani gave a classic example of what their enterprise customers want: the ability to retain their physical applications and workloads as they move towards a virtualized and private cloud environment. She said, "Companies like Cisco offer the infrastructure that can deliver performance and scale and the openness we are driving from an industry standardization perspective." She also emphasized that it is important for the industry collectively to continue to innovate and standardize in parallel. Furrier brought up the topic of how enhancing security brings additional overhead, especially around virtual machines. From Cisco's perspective, Jiandani described how Cisco is taking its physical firewall products and supporting all of those same capabilities in the virtual world. "Our typical physical appliances have been offering internet edge firewall capabilities. When you marry that with offering those same capabilities with our virtual firewall products and extend it across VXLan types of technologies, you truly will see the ability for the underlying infrastructure to be optimized around performance and scale." Vellante asked Jiandani to speak to the topic of vendor lock-ins, to which she replied, "The goal here is to allow for an open API that allows customers the automation functionality and the ability to operationalize without walking away from their current operational model." It's about how to drive innovation while standardizing and offering the customer the choice of openness. On a final note, Jiandani talked about how Cisco has brought their innovations to fabric based computing models. This means no more deploying applications in silos, but instead, deploying across converged infrastructure, moving from physical to virtual to cloud-based models.