Photos: Inside Cisco's European datacentre

Try and spot the disk drives. The empty space below the twin system units give the clue — there are no disk drives. These are two HP servers running fully virtualised at Cisco’s Amsterdam facility.

As part of its developing data centre strategy, Cisco has completely revamped its infrastructure. Where it once used only dedicated computers and storage it has now moved to pooled resources — systems and storage are shared, making for a more flexible infrastructure where components can be dynamically re-allocated as requirements change.

But even pooled resources have to be allocated and re-allocated as needs change.

The next step is to move to a virtual architecture where servers and storage only exist virtually and can then allocated dynamically to where they are needed. Virtualisation is close to Nirvana for the IT manager. Just pick the required resource allocate across the network and they can settle into their new virtual home and begin work instantaneously.

That is the theory at least, and one that Cisco is putting into practice. According to Cisco’s IT manager for data systems in Europe, Bob Stemmerik, Cisco has virtualised nearly all its own applications. The biggest advantage? Speed.

"84 percent of our virtual machines are delivered and configured in under a day," Stemmerik said. "100 percent in less than five days."