Avatar

Today, I am pleased to share the news that Cisco WAAS 5.0 has been certified by SAP for integration with the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform 7.0.  Cisco WAAS 5.0  on the Cisco WAVE-594 appliance has been tested for performance preservation, secure encrypted communication, reliability, and functional correctness with SAP NetWeaver 7.0.  The WAN bandwidth utilization is typically reduced by 20 percent or more.

In addition to the performance benefits verified during SAP certification testing, Cisco introduced WAAS 5.0 earlier this year, which includes the following features: Continue reading “Cisco WAAS 5.0 Achieves SAP-Certified Integration with SAP NetWeaver®”



Authors

Allison Park

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

Avatar

Having had a great time at  EDUCAUSE 2012 in Denver this year, I wanted to follow-up on an interesting story from the University of Colorado at Boulder.  Universities around the country are using technology to drive greater levels of knowledge sharing and improve the effectiveness of education, and our friends at CU Boulder are no excpetion.

A strong example of how Cisco technology is making  a difference in the world of education is the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder. In a session at EDUCAUSE, Max Lopez, senior wireless engineer at CU Boulder, explained the challenges the campus was facing, why they chose Cisco wireless networking technologies to address those challenges, and the results they’ve seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgQ8W-uXQfI

Continue reading “Cisco Delivers the Power of Wi-Fi to a Colorado University”



Authors

John Tuohy

Senior Manager, Education Industry Marketing

Public Sector Marketing

Avatar

The mobility trend holds great promise for improved productivity and new engagement models. These are most powerful in a learning effort—imagine learning anywhere and anytime. I just wish I had the Internet and the mobility that students have today when I went to school. Yet, mobility is an IT tsunami that will not recede. One of the most damaging aspects of this storm is the possibility of numerous personal devices that are entering organizations, accessing the network and eventually critical assets, and stealing sensitive data or mistakenly bringing malware. Many people know this policy as BYOD or bring your own device. This is not a new phrase but it is still quite prevalent. Inventory and provisioning of personal mobile devices is just the tip of this wave. Organizations want to control mobile devices to ensure acceptable usage and minimize security incidents.

Continue reading “The Power of Mobility & Learning”



Authors

Kathy Trahan

Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager

Global Marketing Corporate Communications

Avatar

We’ve talked about how the Internet is forecast to carry a million minutes of video every second in the next few years, and how Cisco’s Elastic Core solution will help the core infrastructure carry that load. But a scalable and flexible core is only one piece of the puzzle that network operators need. Who else is helping to make a video-centric future a reality?

One place to look is a solution that’s been developed by Miami, FL based NxtGn and Virginia-based Telarix. We wrote about NxtGn’s affiliate Next Communications last year, they’ve been successful in wholesale voice communications, in part due to in-house technology paired with an off-the-shelf Cisco ASR 1000 router performing Session Border Control functionality. Packing a softswitch and an SBC that can handle 16K voice or HD video calls in half a rack has enabled them to minimize their costs in a relatively low-margin market. Telarix isn’t as well known outside of the carrier market – they specialize in what is known as “interconnect business optimization” – basically the back-office components to handle billing, auditing, and traffic routing between carriers. While the concept of billing and auditing might make your eyes glaze over, if carriers can’t figure out how to bill for services rendered you can imagine they view that as a really bad thing.

What NxtGn and Telarix have Continue reading “Cisco Helps NxtGn and Telarix Deliver IPv6-enabled Video Solution”



Avatar

Cisco’s Smart Grid Team is excited to support the Wireless Smart Utility Network Alliance (Wi-SUN). Lionel Chocron, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Connected Energy Networks Business, will be representing Cisco on the Wi-Sun board of directors. Cisco will be joining at the promoter level and the entire team is looking forward to helping drive the development of interoperable Field Area Networks (FAN) for utility applications.

Field Area Networks today are often closed,  proprietary systems and generally just supporting a single service. As a result, they do not support interoperability across multiple vendors or take advantage of the decades of networking expertise available within the Internet Protocol suite (IP).

By supporting Wi-SUN, Cisco will help drive the technical definition for standards based, multi service, secure, and scalable Field Area Networks. The Field Area Networks will support important utility use cases including Automatic Metering Infrastructure, Outage Management, and Distribution Automation.

The Wi-SUN defined Field Area Network will be based upon the IP protocol suite, with the initial release based on IEEE 802.15.4g PHY and 802.15.4e MAC wireless mesh technologies.  Usage of the IP protocol suite will provide many benefits, including the ability to support additional PHY/MAC technologies in the future.

Our team will further assist in the development of certification testing and “plug-fests” for regions around the world. This will ensure international interoperability between multiple vendors implementing the Wi-SUN defined Field Area Network.

“We are very pleased to be joining the Wi-SUN alliance, and look forward to collaborating with our industry partners to bring interoperable, standards based utility Field Area Networks to reality,” said Lionel Chocron, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Connected Energy Networks Business Unit.

Other companies who are promoters of the Wi-Sun alliance include:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further details about the Wi-SUN Alliance can be found here

Cisco Connected Grid products and solution information is available here



Authors

Paul Duffy

Senior Technical Leader

Enterprise CTO Team / Industrial IoT

Avatar

When playing in the high speed switching game – timing is everything.  Timing ‘sets the pace’ for visibility to established the ‘where and when,’ correlation across a broad computing environment plus compliance and digital forensics with precision time stamps.  Every element of the data center requires accurate timing at a level that leaves no room for error.

Speed is the other, more celebrated, if not obvious requirement, for the high speed switching game.  Speed that is measured in increments requiring some new additions to my vocabulary.

When looking at the ways in which we measure speed and regulate time throughout the network, I was of course familiar with NTP or Network Time Protocol.   NTP provides millisecond timing…which, crazy enough…is WAY TOO SLOW for this high speed market.   Now being from the South, I may blink a little slower than other people but I read that the average time it takes to blink an eye…is 300 to 400 milliseconds!  A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.  That is considered slow?

Turns out ‘micro-second’ level detail is our next consideration.  A microsecond is equal to one millionth (10−6 or 1/1,000,000) of a second. One microsecond is to one second as one second is to 11.54 days. To keep our blinking example alive: 350,000 microseconds.  Still too slow.

Next unit of measure?  The Nanosecond. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second.  One nanosecond is to one second as one second is to 31.7 years.  Time to blink is just silly at this point.

At one point in time I used to think higher speeds were attainable with higher degrees of bandwidth.  This may be why the idea of ‘low latency’ seems so counter-intuitive. As you hopefully understand at this point, there are limitations to how fast data can move and that real gains in this area can only be achieved through gains in efficiency – in other words, the elimination (as much as possible) of latency.

For ethernet, speed really is about latency.  Ethernet switch latency is defined as the time it takes for a switch to forward a packet from its ingress port to its egress port. The lower the latency, the faster the device can transmit packets to its final destination.  Also important within this ‘need for speed’ is avoiding packet loss. The magic is in within the balancing act: speed and accuracy that challenge our understanding of traditional physics.

Cisco’s latest entrant to the world of high speed trading brings us the Nexus 3548.  A slim 48 port line rate switch with latency as low as 190 nanoseconds. It includes a Warp switch port analyzer (SPAN) feature that facilitates the efficient delivery of stock market data to financial trading servers in as littles as 50 nanoseconds and multiple other tweaks we uncover in this 1 hour deep dive into the fastest switch on the market. The first new member of the 2nd generation Nexus 3000 family.   (We featured the first generation Nexus 3000 series in April 2011)

This is a great show – it moves fast!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHPxrd3hdkU

Segment Outline:

  •  – Robb & Jimmy Ray with Keys to the Show
  •  – Berna Devrim introduces us to Cisco Algo Boost and the Nexus 3548
  •  – Will Ochandarena gives us a hardware show and tell
  •  – Jacob Rapp walks us through a few live simulations
  •  – Chih-Tsung, ASIC designer walks us through the custom silicon

 

Further Reading:

Nexus 3548 Press Release

 

Cisco Blogs

Jacob Rapp:  Benchmarking at Ultra-Low Latency

Gabriel Dixon: The Algo Boost Series

Dave Malik: Cisco Innovation provides Competitive Advantage

 

 

 

 

 



Authors

Robb Boyd

Producer, Writer, Host

Avatar

Yesterday, Cisco announced that we closed on the acquisition of Cloupia.  Cloupia is now officially part of Cisco and a very exciting new addition to our Unified Management software portfolio.

Ever since the news broke about Cisco’s intent to acquire Cloupia, I’ve been asked how this fits with our other data center and cloud management software products.  In short, Cloupia’s strength is in converged infrastructure management and it’s a powerful complement to Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager as well as our cloud management software.

The Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller extends the value of UCS Manager and provides deeper compute, storage, and network provisioning for converged infrastructure solutions including FlexPod, ExpressPod, Vblock, and VSPEX.  It delivers a unified control point for this infrastructure, with physical and virtual resource management that can be combined with our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud solution.  There are also potential synergies with other management software products in our portfolio including Cisco Network Services Manager and Cisco Virtual Network Management Center for the automation and provisioning of network resources.

Last week, I was at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas where I spoke with several analysts, customers, and partners about this new addition to our software portfolio. I’ve used the graphic below to illustrate our perspective on the management requirements for cloud computing – showing how infrastructure management provides an essential foundation for cloud management and orchestration.

One of the key take-aways from the feedback I heard at the conference was that Cisco has a highly differentiated position in the data center and cloud management market. Many of our competitors have resource management for virtual compute, but their functionality to manage physical resources is limited; few have the ability to manage storage and network infrastructure.

With Cloupia, we’ve strengthened Cisco’s ability to manage both physical and virtual resources across compute, storage, and network infrastructure.  Now IT administrators can quickly setup and configure Unified Data Center solutions built around our best-in-class Cisco UCS and Nexus products, from within a single management console – improving both IT speed and agility.

And how does this fit with Cisco’s existing cloud management products?  Like peanut butter and jelly, infrastructure management and cloud management are actually quite different. You can refer to this blog post by my colleague Wayne Greene for an overview and some key distinctions.  But, like with peanut butter and jelly, when you put the two together – it’s a great combination.  That’s the vision we have for Cloupia and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud: better together.  Spread it on some UCS, and it’s PBJ time.

As with many software acquisitions in this space, we recognize that there are some areas of similar functionality across our management products – and our product engineering teams will be addressing that in our roadmaps going forward.  Now that the acquisition has closed, our teams can focus on this collaboration and integration.  The graphic below illustrates how Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud will use Cloupia’s northbound API to consume physical and virtual resources in a Vblock, FlexPod, VSPEX, ExpressPod, or other Cisco converged infrastructure solution.

Converged infrastructure management from Cloupia is the foundation for dynamically provisioning compute, storage, and network resources.  Process orchestration is required to manage the end-to-end workflow, bringing infrastructure automation together with business policies and your existing IT operations environment. And as James Staten of Forrester pointed out in a recent blog post, it requires a portal interface and service catalog to “unify enterprise-cloud consumption” across application and infrastructure services, and across private and public clouds.

One way to look at this synergy is to think about the “supply chain” for your IT services: spanning converged infrastructure management, process orchestration, and the end-user service catalog.  At one end, you have the factory – it’s where you put together the raw materials (VMs, LUNs, blades, switches), configure the resources, and control the infrastructure. Then you have logistics for transportation and warehouse management, including third party intermediaries – that’s the process orchestration and integration with other operational systems.  And finally, every cloud needs a storefront – that’s the service catalog and self-service provisioning experience for IT consumers.

To push the analogy a bit further, let’s start with some raw ingredients. Take coffee* as an example – sounds simple and straightforward, like infrastructure.  But is it?

Starbucks claims to have 87,000 combinations on their menu. It can get pretty complicated (like a grande decaf no-whip skinny peppermint white chocolate mocha with an extra shot).

In much the same way, infrastructure-as-a-service may sound simple.  Isn’t it just a few basic ingredients with compute, storage, and network?  But think about all the variations and service options (like backup or 24×7 support) required for enterprise application hosting.  Even if you’re using the same infrastructure components, it’s much more than provisioning VMs, LUNs, and VLANs.

When you do it right, you can hide all this complexity from the end user.  The power of the apparent simplicity in the Amazon.com catalog interface, combined with their logistics and supply chain operations behind the scenes, is what fueled the company’s success in e-commerce.  And while your IT service catalog may not have the millions of SKUs that Amazon.com sells on their website (or the 87,000 options on the Starbucks menu), customer satisfaction and operational efficiency is just as important to managing your infrastructure and IT services.

That’s the value of converged infrastructure management when combined with cloud management: providing a simple and easy-to-use experience with on-demand provisioning, along with governance and process orchestration, to deliver the right services at the right time at the right cost to your IT consumers.

And that’s our vision for the addition of Cloupia to Unified Management.  Better together.  Please join me in welcoming Cloupia to the Cisco team.

*Thanks to Kevin Kelling (@BlueShiftBlog) for the analogy.



Avatar

The “We’re Listening” blog continues to look at actions taking place across Cisco to improve your experience working with us. In this post, Jim Fuller, Senior Director of Technical Services focused on entitlement, joins us to talk about improvements to services accessibility.  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
By Guest Contributor Jim Fuller
 
 

Imagine you’re in the back seat of a taxi—the driver is in complete control.  You have little to no control on speed or route, limited visibility, and no power.  Now, imagine you’re the driver—you control speed and course, have full visibility, and it’s your hands on the wheel—you are empowered.  That’s what I’m going to talk about—improvements we’re making to simplify customers and partners’ ability to take the driver’s seat.  Continue reading “The We’re Listening Blog Series: Simplifying the Entitlement Experience through Streamlined Access Management”



Authors

Curt Hill

Senior Vice President

Customer Assurance

Avatar

The trends and challenges with the ever-increasing tech-savvy society we live in today are carrying over into the retail banking industry. Retail banking customers are more connected now than ever, with most of our customers’ homes having more technology in them than our branches. Couple these technology trends with major shifts in the way customers want and choose to bank, and it is clear why many in the financial services industry are re-evaluating the way their institutions operate and deliver products and services.

When we take a deeper look at the retail banking industry today, we can see that many of the changes necessary are being driven by consumer needs and expectations. The multichannel approach, while an improvement from disconnected delivery channels of the past, is no longer sufficient to address these new consumer demands.

Multichannel versus Omnichannel: What’s the difference?

An omnichannel strategy can be considered an evolution from multichannel. In essence, the omnichannel approach combines the physical channel that is the bank branch with virtual channels such as online and mobile. With omnichannel banking, customers choose how they want to bank, be that at their local branch; contact center; any other bank branch; from home; or from their mobile device. The challenge facing retail banks is how to ensure a seamless, consistent experience for the customer that results in unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction and growth and profitability for the bank.

At this stage, however, we must understand what the exact needs of the customer are and how we can help retail banks meet their customers’ needs. Continue reading “New Strategies in Retail Banking: Giving Customers Control of How They Bank”



Authors

Jason Bettinger

Practice Director

Financial Services, Americas Business Transformation