Cisco released the Cisco VSS 1440 which, for those who are not in the know, is a pretty big deal. It is very apparent now that Cisco is moving more and more in the direction of virtualization for their platforms and in supporting virtual environments. I think this is a very good development and will bring about a whole new series of product innovations for the company.
This platform and the 3750E series platforms are now going to become the primary methods that data centers connect in a high available and redundant fashion large scale VMware VI3 deployments. The technology is well aligned and from a design and deployment standpoint you couldn't ask for much more. I hope they will add support soon for some of the service modules soon which would make this solution an absolute powerhouse. I am sure that is coming so I would have to say this puts Cisco back up on the pay attention list.
On a side note - it does appear that Cisco is trying much harder on the UC front with the release of Microsoft's OCS 2007 product. I hope they push even harder to innovate and get more robust client solutions out there for the UC platforms.
- Ed