A guided tour of Cisco's proof-of-concept centre

Cisco took CRN editor in chief Nate Cochrane on a behind-the-scenes tour of its proof-of-concept centre.

The St Leonards, NSW, facility is a proving ground for customer equipment to be qualified against Cisco gear. It includes access to a wide range of networking equipment including optical kit, network traffic generators and state-of-the-art fabric computing based on Fibrechannel over Ethernet standards.

Resellers can come through the data centre with their customers in tow to speak to Cisco engineers about their requirements and put with virtualisation hardware and software solutions through their paces.

Those outside the Sydney metro area can teleconference with the lab's engineers at any of the networking vendor's telepresence suites through the country.

Cisco advises resellers to speak to their account managers to negotiate access to the centre and its resources.