Avatar

It was 1918 – World War I had just ended and the Spanish Flu epidemic was raging across Central Florida. In Orlando, a dedicated group of doctors and community members joined together to raise a 50-bed, non-air-conditioned hospital to care for the sick. Orange General Hospital opened with the mission of providing top-level care for all community members, and has done just that for the past 95 years.

While the mission for the organization hasn’t changed, Orange General Hospital has grown to become Orlando Health – one of Central Florida’s most comprehensive, not-for-profit hospital systems composed of six wholly-owned hospitals and two partnership hospitals. The 2,000-plus bed system serves nearly 2 million residents and includes Orlando Regional Medical Center, MD Anderson Cancer Center Orlando, and the Arnold Palmer Medical Center, which consists of Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Winnie Palmer Hospital for Woman & Babies. As a not-for-profit organization, Orlando Health’s top priority is the welfare of the community, and all excess revenues are used to benefit the community.

Continue reading “The growth of Orlando Health – 95 years of innovative community care”



Authors

Barbara Casey

Senior Executive Director, Healthcare

Americas Business Transformation

Avatar

Introducing 4451-X Frickin Awesome 400Thinking about remote site networks in a totally new way.

This week Cisco announced a new member of the Integrated Services Router family.  The ISR 4451-X might not seem that unique at first glance.  Here’s Cisco releasing another new router that adds to their already extensive branch router portfolio – the ISR G2.  However, the newest ISR really is a #GameChanger when it comes to building a modern, future-proof network designed with business critical applications in mind.

That isn’t just marketing fluff in this case.  The ISR 4451-X was designed from the ground up with rich network services and application delivery in mind.  It really is the first platform conceived and built from the very beginning with a laser focus on application experience in a remote branch office.  Maybe we even need a new name because in some ways it really is changing what it means to be a “router.”

The Concept

When we started thinking about designing a new high-end branch router, several things were happening simultaneously with our large Enterprise customers.  First, the role of applications was changing in the network.  With modern business-critical applications being delivered across the wide-area network are now critical for keeping the front doors open, the network is now more critical than ever to businesses of all types. Continue reading “Introducing An Entirely New Direction in Branch Offices”



Authors

Matt Bolick

ENGINEER.TECHNICAL MARKETING

SRTG Marketing - US

Avatar

It’s summertime. For most people, the warmer temps and holiday weekends are the perfect excuse for a vacation. But have you ever traveled to an amusement park or exotic destination only to wait in line for hours for the hottest ride or trendiest restaurant? Or perhaps your coolness factor would skyrocket if you didn’t have to keep track of ticket stubs, receipts and maps? Well, the ups and downs of amusement park experiences may be able to be saved for the roller coasters. Could the Internet of Everything be changing how we experience…experiences?

Just recently, I stumbled across an article on All Things D by Bonnie Cha titled, Tomorrowland Today: Disney MagicBand Unlocks New Guest Experience for Park Goers. The article highlights new technology that Disney World Resort in Orlando has been using in trial phases and hopes to have broad implementation soon. The technology, called MagicBand, is a connected band (bracelet) designed to be an all-in-one device connecting park goers to everything through Radio Frequency technology. Visitors will be able to access the theme park and hotel rooms, purchase food and souvenirs and add extra options via My Disney Experience website.

Continue reading “The Internet of Everything…A Small World After All?”



Avatar

Today, at Cisco Live! in Orlando, we shared a vision for a revolutionary networking architecture that will transform data centers and usher in a new era of Application-Centric Infrastructure.

The realization of this vision will optimize data center infrastructure for the new breed of mobile-cloud era applications that has evolved around the massive proliferation of connections between people, processes, information and devices that we call the Internet of Everything.

Big Data applications such as Hadoop, cloud applications such as Salesforce and Cisco WebEx, and massively scalable consumer video applications such as NetFlix and YouTube are typical of this new breed. 

The challenge with these applications in particular, is that they need to be able to run across multiple servers and data centers, be able to parallel process asynchronous tasks, and be continually available, globally.  These applications rely on both physical and virtual infrastructures and, as a result, place new demands on the data center to deliver applications at scale, with the level of availability, quality of service and flexibility that today’s businesses demand. 

Through our Application Centric Infrastructure vision, we will help IT departments dramatically simplify how they provision their data center resources (networking, servers, storage and services) that are critical to the performance of their applications.  It’s a key component in the evolution to the model for next generation IT that I detailed in my keynote at Cisco Live! Orlando.

In order to meet these demands, the infrastructure must evolve. It must become application-centric.  Network, compute, and storage need to be able to operate as one high-performance resource pool that can be provisioned instantly and automatically according to the needs of the application and related IT policies with security pervasive throughout. This type of dynamic, automated infrastructure provisioning requires a single point of management for the integrated needs of application, network and security administrators that replaces the fragmented, siloed views they have today.

And it’s this vision for the next generation data center that we will deliver, to the market, while helping customers evolve their existing investments for the future.  The Application Centric Infrastructure will give our customers the agility to deliver applications to end-users where they want, when they want, and to any device they want  – securely, rapidly, and at a lower cost. 

Why Isn’t the Traditional Model of Networking Sufficient for the Cloud, Mobile and Big Data Era?

We’ve made huge strides and delivered phenomenal innovations with our Cisco Unified Fabric that brings together LAN, SAN, and converged networks.  And I’m excited that we can continue to bring operational simplicity and scale across physical and virtual environments with Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) and the new switching platforms we also announced today. 

But we’ll only meet future demands when we can bridge the gap between applications and infrastructure, in addition to unifying the siloes of infrastructure.  The fabric is extremely valuable in bringing together disparate systems, and the logical next step would be convergence for applications deployment and performance.  Let me use an analogy to explain.

In the consumer world, if you buy an approved Android App, you know it’s going to run well on your mobile device because the developer used an Android development toolkit to optimize the app for the O/S. Once bought, the App doesn’t need to know the details of your device, the O/S simply ‘tells’ the device which resources it needs to run really well.

No such abstraction layer exists in the data center today.  To make applications run really well, apps need to be programmed to the individual networked elements at the command line level.  Imagine if every time you bought a new smart phone app, you had to manually configure your device’s screen resolution, graphics card, keyboard, broadband connection etc. In the data center, the process is this manual, complicated, slow, and thereby expensive.

And why SDN is not the answer…

While it might seem that SDN is supposed to solve this exact challenge, I want to share my thoughts on where it falls short.

SDN promised to meet the needs of new apps by delivering greater scale, programmability, centralized management and automation.  But SDN, to date, can’t meet the needs of applications because it mimics the old model of networking. It doesn’t unify physical and virtual. It is flow-based (focused on individual networking elements), and not object-oriented (creating a configurable system of all IT resources). It can’t offer dynamic centralized policy management, programmability because it is constrained by old proprietary-standards model.

And with the changing applications world, we need more.  We need an approach broader than what’s been defined as the separation of the control and data planes.  Beyond SDN, the next generation data center must:

  •  Be created with an object-oriented design
  • Provide a single point for dynamic policy management across physical and virtual resource pools
  •  Be a system that is deeply programmable for rapid application provisioning and placement
  • Incorporate an open source approach to ensure total integration with RESTful interfaces into system-level management software
  • Enable multi-tenancy and virtualization, without performance penalties
  •  And have deep ecosystem support from application, management, and services vendors.

That is precisely the type of Application Centric Infrastructure Cisco will deliver with our new networking architecture.

A Complete Solution: Application Centric Infrastructure

In the second half of 2013, Cisco will begin to introduce the elements of this new secure architecture, starting with best-in-class infrastructure components, and followed by software that enables centralized, application and policy-driven automation, and unified management of physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures.

Accelerated to market by Cisco’s investment in the data center start-up Insieme Networks, we think the benefits to customers will be huge, and include:

  • Application Velocity (Any workload, anywhere): Reducing application deployment time through a fully automated and programmatic infrastructure for provisioning and placement. Customers will be able to define the infrastructure requirements of the application, and then have those requirements applied automatically throughout the infrastructure.
  • A common platform for managing physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure: The complete integration across physical and virtual, normalizing endpoint access while delivering the flexibility of software and the performance, scale and visibility of hardware across multi-vendor, virtualized, bare metal, distributed scale out and cloud applications
  • Systems Architecture: A holistic approach with the integration of infrastructure, services and security along with the ability to deliver simplification of the infrastructure, integration of existing and future services with real time telemetry system wide.
  • Common Policy, Management and Operations for Network, Security, Applications: A common policy management framework and operational model driving automation across Network, Security and Application IT teams that is extensible to compute and storage in the future.
  • Open APIs, Open Source and Multivendor: A broad ecosystem of partners who will be empowered by a comprehensive published set of APIs and innovations contributed to open source.
  • The best of Custom and Merchant Silicon: To provide highly scalable, programmatic performance, low-power platforms and optics innovations that protect investments in existing cabling plants, and optimize capital and operational expenditures.

 As we prepare to write the next chapter in the evolution of the data center, I couldn’t be more proud of our team.  It is the true realization of Cisco’s innovation principles – build, buy, partner and integrate. We’re delivering a fundamentally new vision with disruptive, breakthrough innovation.

I look forward to telling you more in the fall!

 



Authors

Padmasree Warrior

Chief Technology & Strategy Officer

Avatar

Cisco today introduced Application-Centric Infrastructure as the vision for Next Generation Data Center architecture, built for both today’s physical and virtual workloads as well as tomorrow’s highly dynamic Cloud-based, and performance-intensive big data application environments. Please check out Padmasree Warrior’s blog or Cisco Unified Fabric to learn more.  

What I would like to share with you is how we are evolving the Cisco Unified Fabric to deliver operational simplicity through superior integration.

https://youtu.be/MNnv2Y_k6EY

Introducing Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA)

Delivering Operational Simplicity through Superior Integration

As organizations accelerate private and public cloud deployments, IT organizations and data center networks must evolve to meet rapidly changing and growing requirements.  Virtualized and cloud environments require more agility and simplicity to quickly deploy and migrate virtual machines. IT organizations, on the other hand, are challenged with operational complexity, architectural rigidity and infrastructure inefficiency with manual processes, disjointed provisioning, deficient software overlays, static resource allocations and disruptions when growth is needed.

The good news is that Cisco continues to evolve its Unified Fabric to address these needs. The new Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation delivers unsurpassed operational simplicities through superior integration. It does this by …. Continue reading “Introducing Cisco Unified Fabric Innovations: Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation, Nexus 7700 Switches, and F3 Modules”



Authors

Berna Devrim

Former Senior Manager of Marketing

No Longer at Cisco

Avatar

Having been part of the team who developed the Cisco Cloud Enablement Services, our professional services to help customers enable and adopt cloud computing, I was absolutely delighted watching the CiscoLive! keynote yesterday to hear Padmasree Warrior announce the results of the March 2013 IDC market research study that showed Cisco come out on top for cloud professional services [Source: “2013 U.S. Professional Services Opportunities Related to Cloud Services”, IDC Doc # 239862, March 2013].

In this survey, as  the chart below shows (reproduced with the kind permission of IDC), respondents indicated that Cisco professional services were used most often across all of the three cloud categories that IDC measured: cloud applications, cloud application platforms, and cloud infrastructure.  Ahead of Accenture, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle/Sun, HP and others.

IDC March 2013 - Cisco Leads Professional Services for Cloud

Continue reading “Cisco Professional Services for Cloud Ranked #1 in IDC Survey – Announced at CiscoLive!”



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Avatar

While at Cisco Live! in Orlando, Fla.,  I had the pleasure of leading a tour of the future Veterans Administration (VA)  Medical Center at Lake Nona, along with Dr.  Kenneth Goldberg, the center’s new chief of staff.

This amazing facility will be the first new VA hospital to be built in the U.S. in nearly 20 years. When complete, it will be a state-of-the-art medical center that will care for many of the approximately 400,000 veterans and their families living in Central Florida (1.8 million veterans call Florida home).

The 1.2 million square-foot facility in Orange County will be one of the largest hospitals in the VA system. It will have a large multispecialty outpatient clinic, a 134-bed inpatient diagnostic and treatment hospital, a 118-bed nursing home, a 60-bed domiciliary, and a veterans benefit mini service center. Its campus will also include the Simulation Learning Education and Research Network, which is a high-technology, immersive environment that uses simulation to train VA medical personnel. Continue reading “Touring the Future VA Medical Center at Lake Nona during Cisco Live!”



Authors

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

Avatar

Complexity and Cost Comparison: Cisco UCS vs. IBM Flex System is report recently published by Principled Technologies.

They evaluated both the technologies and costs of each solution and found a UCS solution is both less expensive to deploy and less complex to manage than an IBM Flex System.

Off all the ways Principled Technologies shows how UCS is a superior solution, I wanted to touch on just one: highly available and scalable management. A UCS management domain consists of a pair of Fabric Interconnects and supports up to 160 blade and/or rack servers. In contrast, IBM is limited to 54 blade servers plus a non-redundant Flex System Manager node. Quoting from the paper:

Because IBM Flex System Manager nodes do not failover automatically like the Cisco UCS solution, administrators must manually connect to a backup node and bring it online. Each target system has an OS agent that remains registered to the original FSM node and does not recognize the new FSM. Admins must manually unregister each of these agents from the failed node and then register the new FSM node. [page 7]

Read the full report to learn the many additional ways which UCS is shown to be superior solution and why Cisco has leapt ahead of IBM and is now the #2 blade server vendor worldwide1

 

Would like to learn more about how Cisco is changing the economics of the datacenter, I would encourage you to review this presentation on SlideShare  or my previous series of blog posts, Yes, Cisco UCS servers are that good.

  1. Source:  IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, Q1 2013 Revenue Share, May 2013


Authors

Bill Shields

Senior Marketing Manager

Product and Solutions Marketing Team

Avatar
Join the conversation with @DaveTheFuturist #IoE2023
Join the conversation with @DaveTheFuturist #IoE2023

It’s probably no surprise to you that my favorite part of Cisco Live is discussing future technology. This year, there are so many ways the Internet of Everything (IoE) is connecting people, process, data and things.

For example, we are looking at a world where our clothes, our glasses, even the pills we swallow, will be connected. In the business arena, IoE enables new processes and creates new value. The data we consume and create is providing new insights. And we are connecting things at record rates. Today there are about 10 billion things connected to the Internet, a little more than one for each person on the planet. By 2023, there will be five times as many—50 billion things—connected. And there is $14.4 trillion of potential economic “value at stake” for global private-sector businesses over the next decade, as a result of the emergence of the Internet of Everything.

Continue reading “Cisco Live 2013 Shows Life in 2023, Thanks to the Internet of Everything”



Authors