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One of the largest industrial exhibitions in the world is coming up next week-  SPS/IPC/Drives which will be held from November 27th-29th in Nuremberg, Germany. This year, Cisco will have a greater presence at this industrial automation and controls trade expo.   One of the interesting aspects of this exhibition is it covers not just components but spans integrated automation solutions including industrial networks.  With a conference sessions and topics that attract over 50,000 line of business attendees (not just from Germany but worldwide), visitors include key decision makers from both controls and production as well as IT from end-users, system integrators, and machinery manufacturers.

Cisco Machine-to-Machine and Connected Industry Solutions

I have attended this show for many years and I am amazed at the continued evolution of the various displays on systems and devices  such as robotics, factory floor applications and more.  In fact, one of the core themes for this year is how to leverage EtherNet/IP networks and cloud based solutions in a production environment.  There is a hunger for information, best practices and real-life examples.  For example, we at Cisco are constantly asked about how our solutions enable secure machine-to-machine communications.

The Cisco booth # 10-514 (see impression below) will feature solutions, devices & architectures relevant to industrial customers including: Continue reading “Visit the Cisco Connected Industries Booth at SPS/IPC/Drives”



Authors

Guy Denis

Sales Business Development Manager

BN Industrial Automation - UK

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By Marc Latouche, Manager, Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) Service Provider

As more and more video traffic streams across service provider (SP) networks, many SPs are deploying content delivery networks (CDNs). In addition to supporting their own operations, these CDNs provide a viable commercial alternative — or complement — to pure-play CDNs (such as Level 3 and Limelight), and enable SPs to earn extra income from the content flowing over their network.

The Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) believes that CDN federations will provide an even farther-reaching solution. Cisco began to develop the concept of CDN federations in 2011, envisioning them as multi-footprint, open CDN capabilities built and shared by autonomous members. With CDN federations, SPs can interconnect — and leverage — one another’s CDN resources, ultimately benefiting all players in the value chain. Consumers gain in quality of service, SPs benefit through increased revenue potential, and content providers benefit in the assurance that their product will be distributed with guaranteed service and to a wider, potentially global audience.

Continue reading “Cisco Pilot Proves the Value of CDN Federations”



Authors

Chris Osika

Senior Director, Global Lead

Service Provider Practice Internet Business Solutions Group

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Today more than ever, networks are transforming the way organizations operate and are touching more people through a wider range of devices than ever before. Achieving a secure infrastructure is increasingly complex with today’s mobility, collaboration and cloud services added to the mix. These new capabilities offer much operational efficiency and reduce costs, but they also introduce additional risk to the network.  Continue reading “The Role of Common Criteria in Cyber Security”



Authors

Kathleen Wilson

Sr. Manager, Marketing and Communications

Security and Trust Organizations

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The Cisco Global Cloud Index reports that annual global data center IP traffic will reach 6.6 zettabytes by the end of 2016 at a compound annual growth rate of 31 percent. The growth of data and these new technologies impacts not only IT systems and infrastructures, but also the professionals that design, install, operate and manage them. Job roles are transforming more quickly in the data center than any other space in IT.
To meet the need for a comprehensive, job-role-focused training and certification program that allows customers and partners to optimize their IT infrastructure, Cisco today announced a Career Certification portfolio consisting of the Cisco CCNA® Data Center and CCNP® Data Center, as well as a robust product training portfolio.

Following the March 2012 announcement of CCIE Data Center, and the recently introduced suite of Nexus 1000v, 2000/5000, 7000, MDS and UCS product training, Cisco now offers a complete portfolio of Data Center training and certification, from the associate to expert level. For the first time, two key pillars of the Unified Cisco Data Center architecture: Cisco Unified Computing and Cisco Unified Fabric are covered across the job roles of design, implementation and troubleshooting.

Both networking professionals that want a new career choice, and current data center professionals who want to maximize their data center equipment design, installation and maintenance skills will enjoy benefits from this new certification track.

Watch below as Jeanne Beliveau Dunn, vice president and general manager of Learning@Cisco discusses the evolution of skills needed to support next generation Data Center technologies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Da319jlD5M

 

To know more about these certifications , visit the following web sites

 Cisco CCNA® Data Center  

CCNP® Data Center

Read also the full release here: http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1105436



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As I wind down and get ready for Thanksgiving, I am thankful for so many people in my life. At Cisco, I have the opportunity to work with amazing people around the world dedicated to helping others. These people are the heroes who help, teach, heal, serve, and protect us.

At Cisco, we believe it is our role to help heroes around the world dedicated to public service.  We share our vision in this short video titled “Being There.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRe4eOF-P5M

Continue reading “Cisco Connected Government: Helping Heroes”



Authors

Kacey Carpenter

Senior Manager

Global Government and Public Sector Marketing

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This weekend I managed to see the new James Bond film, Skyfall.  The technologist in me noticed the transformation of the espionage industry to the cyber world.  More interesting were the Data Center scenes in which the equipment was neatly arranged with minimal cabling.  One blog even called it the data center of the future.

 

(This film image released by Sony Pictures shows Daniel Craig, left, and Javier Bardem in a scene from the film “Skyfall.” Bardem portrays, Raoul Silva, one of the finest arch-enemies in the 50-year history of Bond films.) (AP Photo/Sony Pictures, Francois Duhamel) – Notice the data center equipment in the background.

Reality is that data centers are full of cables (see above) unless you are using Cisco UCS in which case you have a chance of being in the future NOW.  General availability of UCS Manager 2.1, which brings all the cable reduction benefits to rack mount servers could not have been more timely.

Continue reading “James Bond and Data Centers??”



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This past weekend, Google’s IPv6 Statistics reported that on November 17, 2012, user activity on their websites via native IPv6 reached 1% for the very first time. This may not sound like much at first glance, but for a system like the Internet which is slated to have 19 billion active fixed and mobile network connections by 2016, even one percent of this whole marks an impressive achievement. The billions of applications, devices, routers, and switches that make up the Internet are all interconnected such that if any one doesn’t support IPv6 on a given path between the end user and the content the user is trying to reach, the system automatically falls back to IPv4. This is necessary to keep the Internet running while the upgrade occurs, but it also means that the benefits of end-to-end traffic flow over IPv6 occurs only after all the various links in the chain are all capable of supporting IPv6.

To get a better idea of how each individual piece of the deployment puzzle is advancing, Cisco has been tracking various leading indicators and regional deployment statistics. We’ve pulled these together in an interactive tool at 6lab.cisco.com where  you can view IPv6 deployment data from a variety of perspectives. With the tool you can “mouse over” different regions of the world to see how various countries are doing in different areas. For example, by moving your mouse cursor over the United States, you can see that 57% of the networks that appear as transit for IPv4 today also support IPv6, end users as measured by Google is higher than the global average at 1.93%, and that 45% of the time the average user in the US visits an IPv6 reachable website.  You can also dig down into the methodology we are using to create the various rankings and percentages.

Moving the needle

Back in 2007 when Google began publishing its IPv6 measurements, native IPv6 deployment stood at 0.04%. Working together, the industry moved the needle 2500% over the past five years (while adding an additional billion users to the Internet during the same period). To help make this happen, two historic industry events have occurred: The World IPv6 Day in 2011 and the World IPv6 Launch in 2012. During the planning stages for the World IPv6 Launch, I had the privilege to work alongside other industry leaders and the Internet Society until agreement was reached to target three categories of participants that committed to enable production-level IPv6 by default: website operators, network operators, and home router vendors. Cisco signed on and participated as both a website operator and home router vendor.

Making a commitment is one thing, allowing a public measurement for all to see is another. For a website it is rather simple to measure IPv6 deployment as either a “AAAA” record for IPv6 exists in the public DNS system and the website can be reached from the Internet over IPv6 or not. For the network operator category we were looking for a lasting commitment together with some measurable factor that would provide reasonable proof that the network had moved beyond trials and on to production-level deployment. After much discussion, we came up with these two basic commitments for this category:

  1. IPv6 be a “normal part of business operations” for users, targeting ISPs to commit to enable IPv6 for users by default rather than on “special request”
  2. One percent of all user activity as measured by Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Bing over IPv6 by June 6, 2012, the inaugural day of the Launch.

In practice, reaching one percent of user activity means deployment to a considerably larger subscriber base than one percent after accounting for legacy home networking gear, operating systems, and applications. For an ISP to reach this level as measured by the content providers, the “general population” of subscribers would have to brought into the deployment – a strong indication of production-level operation and reasonable proof that the deployment was more than a trial of friendly users or beta testers.

Looking Ahead

The aim of the World IPv6 Launch was to spark a sustained growth of IPv6 usage leading up to and continuing after June 6, 2012. The continued growth since June 6 and the milestone reached this weekend is an indicator that this commitment had its intended affect thus far. The Internet Society is continuing to report measurements for World IPv6 Launch participants, and has been soliciting new members. There are quite a few Network Operators on the list now, including not only ISPs but universities and other types of networks as well. As long as a network  has its own Autonomous System number, it can be measured and potentially added to the participant list. Cisco now has its own AS (#109) on the list, making it the first in the world that is participating in all three categories of the World IPv6 Launch.

User activity as measured by Google hit 0.25% for the first time in March 2011. A year later, on March 10, 2012, it doubled to 0.5% for the first time. It’s taken about 8 months to double that again to reach 1.0% today. If this trend continues, it will double again by mid next year and could break past 10% by the end of 2014. The trend is increasingly clear: If you are a network operator, network-enabled application developer, or anyone else that works with IP and are not running IPv6 now or don’t have a plan in place to make it happen soon, now is the time to get started.

 

 

 

 

 

 



Authors

Mark Townsley

Cisco Fellow

Cisco Development Organization

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We redesigned and updated the blog incorporating many new features designed to improve the blogging experience! Here are some of the major changes you will notice as you explore the site:

The Cisco.com banner is now at the top of every page, hover over the logo to select either the blogs homepage or to go directly to Cisco.com.

 

The Blogs at a Glance module now has a sleek and clean design. We added LinkedIn and Google + social icons to make it easier to share content.

Continue reading “The Cisco Blogs Redesign”



Authors

Lindsay Hamilton

Social Media Blog Program Manager

Global Social Media Marketing

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We’re curious…

What do you look for when choosing  social media training programs you will participate in? It can be daunting, given the variety of information, organizations, and strategies out in the socialphere. On top of that, learning methods and preferences are different for everyone, making it even more important that we each find the type of learning environment that works best for us.

We are continuously learning and absorbing new social media insights, news, strategies, techniques, since the landscape changes so frequently. And we gather this information in a variety of ways, from researching on our own to attending formal courses to one-on-one consulting. While we can educate ourselves quite a bit from gathering information on our own, participating in more formal learning settings can push us forward in our social media skill sets much faster. And at the same time, we have to be careful in choosing the right social media training program that meets our individual needs.

So it leads me back to my original question…what do you look for when choosing social media training programs to participate in? We’re interested in your insights around social media learning. Here is a link to a quick anonymous social media training program survey as part of an informal research project to better understand followers’ social media training preferences.

And below is a quick checklist I use to discern which training programs and formats to participate in:

  • Reputable organization and teacher
  • Education format that matches my preferred learning style (self-serve, group, or one-on-one settings)
  • Focused content around learning, not a sales pitch
  • Educational tone rather than just presenting the information as though it was a meeting
  • Mixture of content to help me learn the principles and then see it in action
  • Variety of tangible and credible examples
  • Short durations to keep my interest and not overwhelm me
  • Key takeaways and ideas I can use right away

What does your checklist look like when choosing social media training? I’m interested in your experience!

I look forward to your comments through this blog post and more of your insights through this short anonymous social media training program survey? This survey will remain open until Friday, December 7, 2012 by 5 p.m. PT. Thank you for your help and participation!