Cisco lands senior Sun veteran

Updated: In-flux Cisco has hired former Sun Microsystems veteran David Yen to lead its fledgling server business. 

Yen, who once led Sun’s storage and server businesses, spent three years at Juniper Networks but left after a recent company structure overhaul, according to the BoomTown blog on All Things Digital. 

Cisco confirmed on Monday that Yen was appointed leader of the Server Access and Virtualisation Technology Group (SAVTG), home to its Unified Computing System and Nexus server access data centre switching portfolio.

Yen will report to co-senior vice presidents of engineering, Padmasree Warrior and Pankaj Patel, according to Cisco.

Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, the founders of Nuova Systems, which Cisco acquired in 2008 and that was the roots of Yen's group, will transition to roles as "senior technical advisors" to Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers.

Yen’s resume includes leading Sun's storage group, serving as the vice president and general manager of its enterprise server business, executive vice president (EVP) of its processor and network products and EVP of scalable systems.    

He had also refreshed Sun’s SPARC server line, according to Sun’s executive biography of Yen. 

Cisco launched its server business in 2009 under the moniker of Unified Computing, but Cisco's servers have yet to rate a mention in its announcements about streamlining operations.

As Cisco killed its consumer Flip video camera, Cisco CEO John Chambers said the it would pursue a “network-centric platform strategy” that focused on core routing, switching and services, collaboration, architectures and video. 

Earlier this week Cisco flagged "sweeping changes" ahead of its May 11 third quarter 2011 financial results.