Unique is the operator of Zurich Airport and offers a broad service portfolio to about 180 other companies, which also reside in the airport. Zurich Airport offers work for about 20,000 individuals and transports approximately 18 million passengers annually. Airport applications like air-traffic control and tower communications demand the highest uptime and need to be separated from operations like baggage distribution, business administration, video surveillance, and public WLAN traffic. Peter Zopfi, Head of Communication Engineering for Unique was confronted with building a network with tunable attributes that were as varied as the businesses that relied upon it. In this podcast Peter discusses what worked and didn’t and how a LAN based MPLS VPN Cisco Network Virtualization strategy was key to delivered business value to all businesses and operations at Zurich Airport. It’s a fascinating discussion that you don’t want to miss. Enjoy, Nick.

Zeus Kerravala, of Yankee joins me to discuss the many changes occurring in the industry including Nortel’s liquidation and Cisco’s huge influence over the industry as it reshapes to respond to its UCS and data center 3.0 initiatives. We discuss HP’s new relationships with MSFT and Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, Enterasys, Extreme, Force10, IBM, Juniper, and much more. We talk winners and losers and provide insight into the major trends that are focusing new corporate IT buying behavior. Enjoy

The market crash of 2008 has modified business behavior & processes permanently. When capex resumes it will not fund follow-on pre crash IT projects but IT projects that are top down driven by executive mandate to streamline operations. IT project winners are Collaboration, Video Conferencing, OPEX reduction, virtualization, security. mobility and cloud computing. Zeus Kerravala, SVP at Yankee and Steve Garrison, VP Marketing at Force10 Networks are my guest as we discuss data center network design in a virtualization post crash era. It’s a great discussion, enjoy.