Cisco Blog > Government
Key to the development of effective public sector strategies for resilience, innovation, and productivity is the ability to navigate at unprecedented scale and speed, complex and distributed communities (networks) of information, people, and things. By tapping the power of these networks, communities can effectively share ideas, expertise, and knowledge, encouraging richer levels of participation.
Smart City development and services through partnerships, collaboration, and community was a major theme at the London Policy Conference (#lonconf) on December 12-13, 2011. Jointly hosted by IPPR, a leading UK think tank, and London’s new think tank, The Centre for London (incubated by Demos), the conference was a platform and network for all those with an interest in London’s future. Sponsored by Cisco alongside other private and public organizations, senior leaders from the public, NGO, and private sectors convened to discuss the major policy challenges facing London and how its future might be best shaped.
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Tags: #lonconf, Cisco, cloud services, IBSG, infrastructure, London Policy Conference, network, S+CC, Smart City, Smart+Connected Communities, urban services, urban sustainability
January 12, 2012 at 7:37 am PST
A recent study from the U.K. Department of Health finds that using remote monitoring technology to keep tabs on patients’ blood sugar and cardiopulmonary disease can reduce the risk of patient mortality by up to 45 percent. With statistics like this, hospitals and medical clinics can’t afford not to embrace telehealth technologies. Not to mention, telehealth is quickly becoming a competitive differentiator in some markets around the U.S. According to Mark Probst, CIO for Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, “I don’t see how the hospital CEO can ignore telemedicine.”
While tech-savvy patients in urban areas will likely begin to demand more user-friendly access to healthcare, therefore driving the adoption of telehealth in metropolitan-area hospitals, the technology is more than just a convenience for residents in rural areas; it can be the difference between life and death. Read More »
Tags: government, rural, telehealth, telemedicine, video conferencing, videoconferencing
January 11, 2012 at 3:14 pm PST
Social Selling Thought Leadership
Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeff Reinke, Editorial Director of Manufacturing.net, The Leading Source for Manufacturing News & Insight. Jeff is recognized as a manufacturing industry thought leader and has produced recent work on the adoption of social media within the manufacturing industry.
Given his expertise, I reached out to Jeff to discuss Social Selling, particularly within manufacturing. His answers provided a lot of great insight into this evolving hybridization of traditional sales/marketing and social media: Read More »
Tags: Cisco, Jeff Reinke, Manufacturing, Manufacturing.net, social media, social selling
January 11, 2012 at 2:00 pm PST
Last week, I took my girls to their first Stanford Women’s Basketball game, a well played game against the University of Oregon. While there, I noticed that almost every person had a smartphone out at least once during the game—and for good reason. Stanford has upped the live sport experience for spectators.
By connecting to the pavilion’s Wi-Fi network with a smartphone, you can order and pay for concession-stand food from your seat. So, you don’t have to worry about missing anything. Plus, you’re able to view replays, participate in contests to win prizes and even play mini-games.
From connected stadiums like Poland’s new National Stadium, which will host the 2012 European Football Championship, to connected cities like Songdo South Korea, Cisco is helping to dramatically improve our experiences and quality of life by capitalizing on the power of the network.
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Tags: connected sports, Poland, Songdo, Stanford, wi-fi
I previously discussed using LISP to optimize your client-server traffic so today I’ll discuss the reverse direction: Egress Path Optimization from the Server to the Client. Let’s go over the need for Path Optimization in the direction from Server-to-Client with some pictures and explanations.
The Virtual Machine (VM) server is configured with a default gateway IP address, 192.168.1.1, which is the next hop IP address that the VM will forward packets towards as the traffic returns to the client outside the data center. In this data center environment, we’ve deployed the default gateway using the First Hop Redundancy Protocol (FHRP). In reality, FHRP is an umbrella technology term that includes Hot Standby Routing Protcol (HSRP) and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), two main technologies that provide transparent failover and redundancy at the first hop IP router. Please see info on FHRP here.
Also notice that the VM default gateway is the same as the HSRP Virtual IP Address (VIP). The HSRP VIP binds itself to one of the physical HSRP Routers via an HSRP election process using Layer 2 control packets between the two physical HSRP Routers and this means that the VM default gateway, since it points to a VIP, may move between physical HSRP Routers, and of course which is then intent and design when using any type of FHRP.
In the above picture, the Path is Optimized from Server to Client, so now let’s take a look at what happens when we migrate the VM to the new data center.
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Tags: cloud, data center, Data Center Interconnect, DCI, FHRP, HSRP, LISP, mobility, N7K, Nexus 7000, OTV, vMotion, Workload Mobility
