At IBC 2012, Nick Thexton, CTO of Cisco’s Service Provider Video Technology Group, shares some his thoughts on the synergies taking place within his new organization and offers a glimpse into the future of television.

Tags: IBC, Service Provider

By any measure, consumers are watching more video with more screens than ever before. Mobile devices both in the home and on the go that make consuming video simple are creating a tidal wave of data. For network owners, the trend of traffic growing faster than revenue is accelerating and putting enormous pressure on existing content delivery networks (CDNs).
At IBC 2012 in Amsterdam, Cisco unveiled its expanded and enhanced CDN portfolio, branded as the Cisco Videoscape™ Distribution Suite (VDS). Cisco VDS, which encompasses eight different products serves as the network distribution engine behind the Videoscape architecture and is a complete, interoperable and holistic solution that bridges cloud and network functionality.

Cisco Product Manager Eli Fuchs discusses VDS and the resulting features and functionality it brings to providers across the video ecosystem.

Tags: Cisco, Eli Fuchs, videoscape, Videoscape Distribution Suite

My dad went to UC Berkeley for engineering, and he always told us that his college life was the definition of minimalist: all he needed was his books, the library, and his intramural volleyball team, dubbed “Open Set” by his teammate (who was a math major). He is currently helping my sister move into her freshman dorm, and you’d be amazed by his current expectations for colleges. Of course they need to have cafeterias serving international fare. Of course they need to have gyms with ellipticals, treadmills, and pools. Of course they need to have libraries with state of the art resources. Of course he, and his child, should be able to get Wi-Fi on their smartphone and laptop in each of those places and everywhere in between! And that’s just what the PARENTS are thinking.

Just like the cafeterias, the gyms, and the libraries, wireless connectivity is not just something that would be nice to have, but a requirement to keep current and prospective students (and their parents, AND their multiple devices) satisfied.

IT organizations all across the world are faced with a ubiquitous challenge of how to handle the implications of BYOD. Corporations have the luxury of implementing a top down approach, defining and enforcing policies amongst its workforce; but  other environments, especially schools and universities, are faced with additional pressures from their user populations. Higher education in particular poses stringent demands on support and bandwidth for their own devices.

Meet the University of Louisville, 22,250 students strong. The problem: a legacy network unable to meet the current requirements of today’s higher education campuses. With 6400 faculty and staff across 8.5 million square feet and 114 buildings across three campuses, the growing organization needed a strong, stable, scalable, wireless solution.

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It’s no secret that Cisco Unified Computing Sytem (UCS) has had some tremendous success in terms of customer adoption.  In just three short years, UCS is nipping at the heals of IBM for the #2 spot for Worldwide x86 blade server revenue with 15.2% market share, compared to IBM’s 15.4%.  In fact, Cisco now has over 15,000 customers that have moved from legacy architectures to a more “Unified” approach, combining compute, network and storage access into a single, easy to manage solution. 

 So what’s missing? 

Well, believe it or not, until now it was relatively hard to do business with Cisco.  Quoting and ordering took days instead of minutes.  Well Cisco is changing that with the release of its new online presence called “Cisco Build and Price“, offering direct access to blade server pricing and rack server pricing.

A Simple Approach to Building and Pricing Cisco UCS Servers

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Tags: blade server, cloud, Cloud Computing, data center, server, server pricing, UCS, unified computing system

In June 2012, National Retail Federation released its  National Retail Security Survey.  In that report it suggests retailers in 2011 lost $34.5 billion to retail theft, or shrink – the loss of inventory due to employee theft, shoplifting, paperwork errors, or supplier fraud. Overall that accounts for approximately 1.41 percent of retailers sales last year.

One of the areas which retailers have invested in to address the shrink and security issue in gereral is video survieillance.  This can cover areas including loading docks and the parking lot  at distribution centers, or along the aisles and checkout in the stores for theft or criminal activities. 

Cisco  recently announced a new Video Surveillance Manager 7 with Suite of Hyper-Scalable Connected Physical Security Solutions that can help retailers address their video surveillance needs in a scalable and flexible manner. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, physical security, retail, retailing, VSM