Photos: Inside Cisco's European datacentre

Cisco's Amsterdam data centre reflects the way the wider company works. The machine room here matches other Cisco facilities in its mix of servers. Cisco is a big user of Linux and Unix. Worldwide, 37 percent of its servers run Linux, 36 percent Solaris and two per cent run HP-UX. The rest run Windows.

Like other companies, the demand on Cisco's data centre is largely split between expanding various parts very quickly, and consolidating and simplifying the way the data centre works.

In the main machine room here there is empty space, and more and more of it. Primarily, the space is freed up because of storage consolidation. Storage arrays are getting smaller in physical size, even as they balloon in capacity.
In 2001, Cisco Amsterdam had just over 520TB of data storage and the vast majority of it was direct-attached storage (DAS). As of 2005, Cisco now has 4.2PB of storage; less than 400TB is in DAS, 2PB are now in SANs and 1.5PB are in NAS.

Similar consolidation in servers, especially with the move to virtualisation, has freed up more than 30 per cent of the floor space at Cisco Amsterdam.