2013 - Page 161 of 232

April 11, 2013 Leave a Comment

One Size Does Not Fit All – Cisco Embedded Industrial Solutions

Walking around the 2013 Hannover Messe Faire can be a daunting task whether its navigating through the Hannover campus and its’ 13 co-located tradeshows or figuring out which one of the broad range of special events, forums and key note speaking engagements to attend. One thing is for certain. The “Internet of Things”, “The Integrated Industry” and “The Industrial Revolution 4.0” themes all describe the evolution of connecting, embedding and extracting intelligence from previously unconnected devices. Although the industries can not come to a consensus on what to call this paradigm shift, one thing is for certain….The chosen protocol that’s empowering this evolution is ETHERNET.

The challenge lies in integrating Ethernet functionality into devices, machines or automation equipment that doesn’t always conveniently fit into a 1u, 2u, 3u, 4u… or DIN rail mounted enclosures. Designers, integrators and machine builders need a flexible alternative to address the diverse applications, size and environmental considerations required to truly take advantage of deploying anytime, anywhere, any device connectivity to industrial automation applications.

Cisco is a pioneer in providing robust, and scalable embedded technology solutions. Kevin Holcolmb, Cisco Technical Marketing Engineer, discusses our new ESS 2020 Embedded Switch. Continue reading “One Size Does Not Fit All – Cisco Embedded Industrial Solutions”

Kevin Davenport

Cisco’s Global Solutions Manager

Industrial Intelligence

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Microsoft on UCS: Simplify Your IT and Transform Your Business

Rex Backman

We’re at the final day of Microsoft’s Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) here in Las Vegas. We’ve handed out ~1,500 t-shirts; performed hundreds of demos on our technologies Nexus 1000V, UCS Manager, VM-FEX, and Cisco PowerTool; evangelized our Microsoft Cloud OS solutions FlexPod and VSPEX; and generally interacted with most of the 5,000+ attendees here.

Show attendees now have a better understanding of our technologies but also and perhaps more importantly, have a better and growing understanding of the true value we bring to their Microsoft oriented data centers.

Figure 1.

As Figure 1 shows, organizations are challenged in many ways – staff inefficiency, unscheduled downtime, OpEx and CapEx pressures, etc. We feel our Cisco Unified Data Center is a viable solution to these challenges. It delivers operational simplicity and business agility – essential for cloud computing. The Microsoft and Cisco alliance extends the value of the Cisco Unified Data Center by integrating Windows Server, Hyper-V, Microsoft workloads such as SQL and Exchange, and finally System Center and UCS Manager management stacks into manageable and scalable solutions. As a highly secure, scalable environment for your organization the Cisco Unified Data Center automates and simplifies deployment, orchestration, and management across server, network, and cloud.

The value derived from a Cisco Unified Data Center we is that we can now help your data center scale to meet your business dynamics; simplify your I.T. management processes; lower your operating costs while delivering world class performance. In the world of Microsoft oriented data centers, we deliver this value to your organization through:

Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions

Move to the cloud quickly and easily with the help of Cisco Validated Designs. Part of the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program, these preconfigured solutions consist of industry-leading technologies from Cisco, EMC (VSPEX) and NetApp (FlexPod). Reduce your risk and enjoy end-to-end architectural and deployment guidance with pretested design guides

Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Workloads

To ensure Cisco customers running Microsoft software get the most from their data centers, Cisco designs, pretests, validates, and provides support for a growing list of Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.

Ability to Consolidate and Virtualize Microsoft Applications

Microsoft applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server are often prime candidates for consolidation and virtualization. Administrators can expedite and simplify virtualization deployment, management, and operations by using Cisco’s high-bandwidth, low-latency, virtualization-aware unified network fabric, Cisco UCS and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

As you can see from the various customer quotes – Xerox, Cassidy Turley, and ING Direct – true value in terms of economies of scale, improved performance, and efficiencies are seen. To learn more about our Cisco Unified Data Center and its transformational power, please feel free to download our new brochure Microsoft on UCS: Simplify Your IT and Transform Your Business

To learn more about Cisco’s Microsoft data center capabilities, please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft

Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Meet Me On The Equinox

Michael Enescu

Congratulations to all OpenDaylight founding partners, contributors, users and supporters. I am convinced this ambitious endeavor will redefine the meaning of “open source = collaboration”. This is a historic event, the coming of age of networking partners driving in the open source world, companies which until now, have been primarily preoccupied with driving open standards, though in many ways, resonating with the tenet of “running code and rough consensus” almost a generation before Open Source did. Perhaps this is, back to the future.

The announcement details are on the Consortium website at the Linux Foundation, contributions come in three categories, a multi protocol Controller platform contributed by Cisco, northbound (NB) applications on top, and southbound (SB) protocol drivers to support them from below. We expect that with such diverse community from the start, we will have a very open, diverse and collaborative development that will accelerate the growth and adoption of these projects for years to come.

Having been in this project from the very beginning, I would like to tell you exactly how and why we reached the open source model that we did, my own perspective in what I think is the key to getting that balance right. But later, not today.

Today is the day to celebrate all those diverse partners that were brought together by one singular desire to grow the market for application centered networking, to grow our collective ecosystem of users, developers, partners and customers, so that we can all win. With a rise in applications NB, more SB vendors will come and with a rise in SB support, more NB applications will arrive – the promise of the infinite feedback loop. I do not believe anyone out there should look for who wins and who loses; in this endeavor, this is a positive move for the industry, this is a win-win for everyone!

I think I’m going to play that “Meet Me On The Equinox” music and get into the OpenDaylight. It’s time to move forward and I hope everyone will.

Michael Enescu

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Cisco’s “Future of Video” Demo Wins NAB Technology Innovation Award

David Yates

Our “Future of Video” (formerly known as “Fresco”) wall took home the National Association of Broadcasters’ Technology Innovation Award this week, during a grand ceremony keynoted by NASA chief Charles Bolden. We are thrilled! (And not just because we’re all latent astronauts around here.)

The NAB award, now in its 5^th year, goes to “advanced research and development projects in communications technologies that have not yet been commercialized,” which is a perfect way to characterize “Future of Video” – our concept of a future television environment in which the walls of our homes become the TV display itself.

The nomination reads:

“Project Fresco demonstrates a future of television that breaks out of the ‘box in the corner of the room’, showing how television will harness new display technology and an immersive layout engine to become unobtrusive, frameless, ultra high definition and ambient. Fresco demonstrates that television’s future is both collective and personal, and shows a new relationship between large screen and companion devices.”

So what does the “Future of Video” look like? Picture your living room wall, festooned with video, audio, and interactivity that can be resized on the fly. Meaning that when the World Cup finals are on, the video occupies the entire wall; when getting started with a cup of tea in the morning, it can be resized to show multiple channels – news on one portion of the wall, weather on another. When not in use, the wall surface recedes into a wallpaper-like covering. It’s just super-cool. If you’ve not seen it, here is a video demo of it.

Our own Simon Parnall, director, new initiatives, Cisco Service Provider Video Technology Group, who was instrumental in designing and building the original “Fresco” demo, accepted the prestigious award. Thanks to you, Simon and the entire Fresco team, and to the NAB for selecting us!

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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Case Study: Cisco’s Private Cloud and Lessons Learned

Rodrigo Flores

This is my talk I gave last week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. One slide that did not make the deck are the top reasons why people struggle with building private clouds

Management and operations process.
Culture
Funding Model
Service description and self-service interface

As my deck says, “I got 99 problems, but the tech ain’t one”

Enabling IT as a Service – Cloud Management and Orchestration from Cisco Data Center

Building a “real” cloud involves the following success factors

Well articulated corporate strategy with phases (crawl, walk, run)
Engage existing automation teams for skills
Well-defined, achievable service definitions that are automatable, volume
Platform that does not lock into a specific hypervisor or cloud API
A team that is trained (with specific roles) on the solution so that they can extend it in combination with the vendor’s services organization
Get into production ASAP to drive value and organizational learning
Union of OOB features and specific configurations for your environment.
Articulated strategy for integrating with certain existing/deployed IT assets, and using the new “Cloud” as a way to shed IT baggage
Recognition that your Cloud Management Platform is extensible to other areas in the IT strategy and that partner products may be necessary as well
Have a suite / framework so you can maintain in the long term. And use external resources
Need clear articulation of career paths once you start removing “button pushers.” design, operations, not implementation
Focus on process outcomes, not process activities. Or end up with innefficient processes

Rodrigo Flores

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Special Guest Post: Observations from Geneva Airport Passenger Terminal Expo – Part 2

Brendan O'Brien

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is a continuation of Brendan’s from Tuesday on my observations from the Geneva Airport Passenger Terminal Expo.

One of the things that strikes me here at the Air Passenger Expo is the proliferation of companies offering some type of passenger flow monitoring solutions. These vary from small startups to large players, and the offerings are a mixture of many technologies: video, cameras, bluetooth, and various types of sensors. The problem most are solving is point-based monitoring, such as how many passengers in the line, how many people are entering, or what is the current wait time in security – all very valuable point information for the Airports to make sure they’re staffed properly and passengers have the best experience.

Continue reading “Special Guest Post: Observations from Geneva Airport Passenger Terminal Expo – Part 2”

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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Cisco and ODVA at 2013 Hannover Messe

Kevin Davenport

The buzz this year at Hannover Messe Fair is around “The Integrated Industry”. One of the key technologies that’s enabling this convergence is unmodified Ethernet being deployed to the factory and plant floor. Cisco’s core strategy for the industrial market is to accelerate the adoption of open standards by partnering with organizations like ODVA. Cisco is a founding member of the ODVA and has enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship for close to 10 years.

Adrienne Meyer, Manager of Member Services at ODVA and Guy Denis, Cisco Business Development Manager – Connected Industries Group reminisce about the history of the relationship and speak about the importance of evolving and developing open network standards and interoperability for the converged manufacturing IT and plant networks, including security, wireless, IP telephony,power over Ethernet and real-time Ethernet/IP.

Continue reading “Cisco and ODVA at 2013 Hannover Messe”