Photos: Inside Cisco's European datacentre

This anonymous building, tucked away in a side street close to Dell's Amsterdam office, is Cisco's European datacentre.

Like any company, Cisco faces many of the usual challenges in running a datacentre, including constant pressure to reduce budget while requirements grow and headcount is frozen, and dealing with multiple operating systems, heterogeneous platforms, changing requirements and poor resource allocation.

But as the giant of the networking world, Cisco should also some have unique advantages.

The Amsterdam facility has a fairly empty car park, an indication of the way that Cisco likes to run it. This is not a site with a lot of people and, as one of the site's managers points out, is "really close to a 'lights out' operation".

Cisco relies on six data centres worldwide, but they are not particularly well spread geographically. Four of the facilities are in the US, and three of those are clustered not far from Cisco's worldwide headquarters in California. There is one in Australia, which is run from the US.

If clustering your datacentres close to the San Andreas fault does not show the greatest foresight, then building the only data centre covering Europe, the Middle-East and Africa in the one country in Europe that is barely above sea-level fits in with that corporate strategy. Floods and earthquakes do not worry Cisco too much.

Around the world, along with its data centres, Cisco has ten engineering/server rooms in 11 countries, covering ten time zones.