We handed out a stack of these buttons for the Cisco booth staff to wear this year and that sums up my favorite part of EMC World:  it's an infrastructure party.  This is a place where you're going to talk with people at the heart of the data center and IT, and the conversations all start there.

Our alignment with EMC couldn't be any clearer than what we had on display last week. VBlock continues to rock and roll and Trey Layton of VCE summed that up quite nicely here.   On the VSPEX front, Cisco recently released 7 new and updated integrated infrastructure designs that combine UCS, Nexus and VNX Storage.  Moreover, Cisco offers these as single-part-number SmartPlay Solution Pak bundles that make them even easier for our partners and customers to order.   Cisco's VSPEX offerings span the gamut on choice of virtualization platform and application, paving that second of the three paths to cloud we talked about at EMCworld.

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware vSphere 5.1 for 50 Virtual Machines

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX VMware vSphere 5.1 for 100, 125, and 250 Virtual Machines

Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V for 50 Virtual Machines

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX: Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 Enterprise Medium M250

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware View 5.1.2 for 500 and 2000 Desktops

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with Citrix XenDesktop 5.6 for 500 Desktops

Cisco Solution for EMC VSPEX: Microsoft SharePoint 2010

On a product front the big news for Cisco was the new MDS 9710 and that brought a lot of visitors into the booth.  I was also really happy by the amount of people that came by to talk with us about UCS and the things we're doing around data center automation.  Each year the conversation has changed and the evolution has been fun to experience:

2010

Customer: "What's that funny looking switch there?"

Me: "That's the Unified Computing System, are you familiar with Cisco's new server platform?"

Customer:  "What? No, really, what's that funny looking switch there??"

 2011/2012

Customer:  "Do you have any UCS on display here?  Our team in XYZ division just deployed it and I'd like to take a look"

Me: "Certainly, let me take you through an overview of the system"

 2013

Customer:  "Hey, I really like what you folks did with the switch-based Fibre Channel zoning in the last release of UCS Manager.  When does version 2.0 of UCS Central come out? We're deploying UCS in three more data centers and I want to talk about implementing global ID pools"

Me:  "Fantastic.  Let me find our systems management expert."

I speak geek pretty well, so when customers come in and want to go deeper than I can on operating the system instead of asking me "Cisco sells servers?"...I know we're in the right place and on the right vector.   Thanks to the EMC and Cisco teams for putting on such a great event.

I'll leave you with a photo here for a caption contest.  Leave your ideas in the comment section and try your best to keep it clean.  My first take is "I loved EMC World 2013 thiiiiiiiiiiiis much!"