In this first part of our interview with George Kurian at Cisco’s headquarters we get to know how Cisco looks at Virtualization in the datacenter from three different sets of product capabilities: pervasive networking platforms, services and VFrame (provisioning and orchestration tools). From his position as the vice president and general manager of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco, he sees the need for server virtualization to be complemented with virtualization capabilities in the network and explains how his teams are engineering the network to be a facilitator for all the virtues Virtualization brings. The goal for George’s data center technology group is to make the network aware of the new atomic unit in the data center: the Virtual Machine and no longer the physical server or port. He goes on pointing to the Nexus series and new introductions for the Catalyst series with capabilities to support some of these (r)evolutionary trends in the data center. In essence Cisco is reducing the number of connections that the server has to have from roughly eight today to only two, thus simplifying power, cooling, cabling, the whole series of transformations in the data center and then from an operational standpoint, providing a single network that you need to manage.