Hoff, aka “Beaker,” runs the Rational Survivability blog and has held high-ranking security positions at several IT vendors and other firms — albeit none as big as Cisco. They include Unisys, Crossbeam Systems and the WesCorp federal credit union.

His hiring at Cisco comes as the networking giant is making its move into the virtualization and data center markets with its Unified Computing System.

UCS aims to unite computing, networking, storage and virtualization, making the technologies easier to manage in a data center — all the while giving Cisco more complete control over said data center (which some IT pros are worried about). It will also bring Cisco into competition with VMware, its partner, which has similar plans for data center domination with vSphere 4.

But if Hoff’s previous blog posts are any indication, don’t expect Cisco to blow up that partnership any time soon. (Although he may challenge Paul Maritz to a sumo wrestling match if things ever get testy.)

Last month, for example, Hoff wrote: “In environments that are designing their next evolution of datacenter architecture, the integration between Cisco, VMware, and EMC are critical. … Don’t think that Cisco and VMware aren’t aware of how critical one are to the other.”

In a blog post announcing Hoff’s hiring, Cisco data center solutions manager Omar Sultan wrote, “I know Chris has the tenacity of a squirrel chasing an acorn, and I am personally quite pleased to welcome Chris to the team as I see he will add both depth and breadth to our efforts.”

In response, Hoff said he was “beyond psyched” to be joining Cisco. He’ll officially join the company Monday.

At a lovely dinner for press and analysts at L’ecrin in Cannes tonight, I had the pleasure of speaking with VMware’s CIO Tayloe Stansbury, who assured me that the company has no designs on becoming a cloud provider. Not that they didn’t consider it. But the more they thought about it, the more they came to the conclusion that it would be reckless to compete with their partners (folks like Savvis, T-Systems and Terremark), Stansbury said.

So what are they doing with that ginormous data center in East Wenachtee? Testing and development, pure and simple. “It’s one of the ironies of being VMware that we have to develop our code on physical hardware,” Stansbury said. In order to assure that ESX can effectively virtualize workloads on any x86 system, VMware’s R&D must test the code against every conceivable server and storage platform. These days, all that hardware is being shipped to East Wenachtee, where it runs on electricity that costs two cents per kilowatt hour, versus the 20 – 30 cents per kilowatt hour VMware pays for power in the places like Palo Alto and Cambridge, Mass.

So I stand corrected (it won’t be the first time). Going forward, I hope VMware decides to share further details about its new data center.