A few months back we announced how Hrvatski Telekom, Croatia’s largest telecommunications company, is using a Cisco’s end-to-end solution for its advanced TeraStream cloud-enabled Internet Protocol (IP) architecture. Operated by Deutsche Telekom subsidiary Hrvatski Telekom (T-HT), it’s initially providing broadband services to residential users in the Zagreb area of Croatia.
Cisco and Deutsche Telekom have Continue reading “DT’s Ian Farrer on the All IPv6 TeraStream Network”
Around 12:00 GMT March 16, 2013, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack took offline both the spamhaus.org website and a portion of its e-mail services. SpamHaus was able to restore connectivity by March 18; however, SpamHaus is still weathering a massive, ongoing DDoS attack. The DDoS attacks have also had less severe but measurable consequences for the Composite Block List (CBL) as well as Project Honey Pot.
The attackers appear to have hijacked at least one of SpamHaus’ IP addresses via a maliciously announced BGP route and subsequently used a Domain Name System (DNS) server at the IP to return a positive result for every SpamHaus Domain Name System-based Block List (DNSBL) query. This caused all SpamHaus customers querying the rogue nameserver to erroneously drop good connections.
According to the New York Times, Sven Olaf Kamphuis is acting as a “spokesman for the attackers.” Kamphuis is allegedly associated with hosting provider “the CyberBunker,” which is housed in an old, five-story NATO bunker located in the Netherlands. CyberBunker has a reputation for “bulletproof hosting,” not only because of the physically fortified infrastructure, but also for their permissive terms of use, stating “Customers are allowed to host any content they like, except child porn and anything related to terrorism. Everything else is fine.” Kamphuis is also allegedly affiliated with the StopHaus group, which publicly claimed responsibility for the BGP hijack attack via Twitter. Continue reading “Chronology of a DDoS: SpamHaus”
Whether you are amongst those building their own private cloud or amongst those leveraging the solutions of cloud providers, you want to attend Cloud Connect Santa Clara next week.
Cisco has been very active over the past years to accelerate the emergence of the cloud computing model. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco CTO and Lew Tucker Cisco cloud computing CTO have been on the forefront of this evolution, developing the concept of a “World of Many Cloud” and more recently the “Internet of Everything” .
Last week Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Cisco VP Data Center and Cloud Solutions Marketing, was writing about a series of webinars on cloud computing, including on April 17 a webcast with NetApp, Microsoft and Intel.
All other the world Cisco organize events with partners to explain how to address the challenges of cloud deployment and make today the right choices to make make amazing things happen tomorrow. If you are in Houston, Dallas you may want to attend one of the “Adopting the Cloud” event that we organize with EMC , Frost and Sullivan and Verizon Terremark.
So it’s pretty natural that Cisco is a Diamond Sponsor for Cloud Connect , which is happening April2-5 in Santa Clara , California .
The concentration of very active high tech companies makes this event exciting for the visitors (see exhibitor lists) . You will find Cisco at the booth #201. In addition of the Cisco solutions, partners such as AT&T, Dimension Data, NTT, Savvis, Sunguard, Windstream will be there as well to talk about deployments.
A quick look at the list of speakers, starting with the keynotes makes it even more attractive.
The agenda is organized around tracks reflecting the care about of IT organizations, such as private cloud and hybrid cloud, mobile cloud, risk management and security, enterprise SaaS strategies, performance and availability, WAN and cloud networking , cloud economics, applications design and architecture, but also big data and software defined networking .
If you want more specifically hear from Cisco and partners , here are some suggestions :
Cloud Computing, SDN, And the Internet of Everything
by Lew Tucker Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Computing | Cisco
Open source cloud platforms such as OpenStack now allow anyone to build their own public or private cloud. This accelerates private cloud platforms usage to not only meet the needs of rapid application development and deployment of enterprise apps, but when combined with SDN also changes the nature of “infrastructure as a service” as a platform for consumer-facing services. Come explore with us this virtuous cycle created by cloud computing, software defined networking, and the internet of everything.
Wednesday, April 3, 10:20-10:35 AM Mission City Ballroom
Choosing Your Strategy in a World of Many Clouds 
by Pat Adamiak Senior Director, SP Data Center and Cloud Solutions | Cisco
Your organization has many options to choose from in the cloud. We are here to share our expertise on how to safely navigate a world of many clouds. Please join us to hear about the industry trends, strategies, and solutions you can put in a successful cloud playbook.
Thursday, April 4, 2:30-3:15 PM Grand Ballroom G
Enabling IT as a Service – Cloud Management and Orchestration
by Rodrigo Flores Cloud Enterprise Architect | Cisco
The promise of running IT departments as an internal service provider has been elusive. In their quest to deliver ITaaS, many companies have suffered from an emphasis on IT operations and less focus on infrastructure and application development, resulting in a siloed IT environment held together by heroic efforts. The majority of IT spending is dedicated to “keep the lights on” activities, hindering IT’s ability to keep up with the pace of business innovation. This session will address why the answer to this IT quandary lies in the implementation of virtualization and cloud computing, describing these as the essential building blocks for the agility, flexibility, and “services” focus that IT needs to achieve ITaaS. The speaker will describe why IT needs to be delivered as a service and why IT must think in terms of delivering services not servers, and “claims processing” rather than “data processing.
Thursday, April 4 2:30 PM–3:30 PM – Location: Grand Ballroom F
Continue reading “Accelerate Your Cloud Strategy : Cisco at Cloud Connect 2013”
Wherever you go and whatever you do in the 21st century, you generate a data trail. Your credit and debit cards, mobile phone, laptop computer, tablet — not to mention retailers, banks, hospitals, hotel systems, and activity on social networks, blogs, and email — all generate data.
Yet, we are currently connecting less than 1 percent of the things, people, and machines that could be online, communicating and collaborating. As we create the Internet of Everything (IoE), the amount of data will rise exponentially, created by your car, clothes, medicines, food, e-books, and presence on video surveillance systems.
The mountain of data collected about people and things has led to a growing industry dealing with high-volume, high-variety, high-velocity, virtual data sets (“the 4Vs”, according to Gartner) — often called “Big Data.” The growth of Big Data is an inevitable reality of a digitally connected world. Continue reading “Dynamic Care: Managing the Patient’s Experience by the Minute”
People are becoming more media savvy than ever before. The advent of social media has resulting in people consuming and sharing more information. A by-product of this is that people have becoming adept at ignoring traditional marketing and advertising and better at spotting marketing content trying to masquerade as something else. The best way to overcome the challenges presented by this new social world is to embrace this awareness and willingness to interact and use it to your advantage.
Marketing in a social word means you need to change when, where, and how you speak to consumers. Instead of sending them a static message (like a traditional ad) you need to interact with them. Here’s a few key things to keep in mind:
Continue reading “5 Steps To Becoming a Social Media Master!”
Hello fellow VDIers…if you are reading this blog first in the series and wondering why we are on Question 9, then check out the following posts to see the entire series:
We also did a BrightTALK session as well, please kindly watch the recording here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/7345/68115
Got Storage?
You bet you do! Storage is a pivotal part of any datacenter. Shared storage rules king these days, and really is challenged by the fact that our desktops are the exact opposite storage model: distributed and direct attached.
Specing out and configuring your storage for a VDI environment can make or break it!
Let me put it this way: Have you used an SSD in your desktop or laptop yet? If not, you are missing out on a truly delightful end user experience.
Things just POP! Boot times can be sub 10 seconds. Apps load almost instantaneously. The spinning blue circle that replaced ye ol’ hour glass becomes a thing of the past. And when you sit down at somebody else’s system that hasn’t made that earth shattering change from clanking disk to silent solid state bliss, you just want to pull your hair out because now your application is taking multiple seconds to respond.
THE SAME HOLDS TRUE FOR THE VDI EXPERIENCE.
Except I’ve been on VDI environments that go from a spinning disk experience to something worse (like that floppy up above perhaps?) All this research we’ve done up to this point around optimizing CPU and Memory doesn’t mean a hill of beans if the CPU’s cores are sitting there twiddling their idle loops waiting on storage. Then your end user wants to pull their hair out and go back to their desktop, which is a pain for you to manage and the opposite goal of the project.
So, while we are not a storage company, I think we all agree that storage is a pivotal part of the VDI equation, and we made some quick and general storage observations in our environment.
THE BOOT STORM: 150 desktops powered on simultaneously
It happens…you had to push an app out last minute, and you are sitting at your desk after an all night-er maintenance blast, and you need to power on all of a department’s desktops. What happens if you do this simultaneously to 150 desktops?
Continue reading “VDI “The Missing Questions” #9: How many storage IOPs?”
Governments around the world understand the importance of a national ICT infrastructure and the role it can play in the economic and social development of a country.
However, there is a significant industry trend called Big Data that, I believe, presents a major opportunity for governments to deliver more targeted services to citizens and businesses.
Three key aspects of Big Data are already impacting governments around the world:
It is not the data itself that creates innovative opportunities for governments, but the potential for analytics and insight around this vast array of information across many formats. Big Data could enable governments to shorten the daily commute for citizens by developing predictive analytics on traffic flows and actual traffic data affecting traffic signaling in real time. Or perhaps governments could help with rapid identification and control of disease outbreaks—from flu, to infectious diseases, to food contaminants.
Cisco attended the Next Generation Insurance Summit (March 11-13) in Newport Beach, CA and the Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium (March 13-15) in Carlsbad, CA. Some of the top minds in the financial services industry were in attendance and it was great to see these leaders deliver ideas and solutions for how to further the customer experience for both industries as well as the agent experience in insurance. Both conferences focused on reducing the amount of time it takes to adopt new technology and innovative ideas for competitive advantage, a current problem many financial institutions are going through.
At the Next Generation Insurance Summit, Cisco’s Michael Cantwell, Financial Services Solutions Architect, delivered a keynote on building a customer centric distribution network and how the expectations of today’s insurance customer has of their insurance institution/agent. He stated that from the end customer’s point of view everything is getting more integrated and simplified, but that insurers have yet to create that agent or customer omnichannel capability that allows for communication channel choice as well as fluid switching during an interaction to answer questions or assist in self-directed channels. Michael also touched on how enabling insurers with new tools and technologies, including sales force automation and mobile devices, will be key to fulfilling overarching business goals of improving sales interactions through traditional channels and, therefore, driving revenue.
Attendees showed immediate interest when Michael spoke about the best methods for line of business executives to work with their IT executives and vice versa. The success of customer retention rates among insurers who have incorporated Cisco solutions to improve customer-centricity was also of special interest to attendees. Continue reading “Recap of Cisco at Next Generation Insurance Summit and Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium”
Yesterday Cisco released the results of a global survey of 1,800 IT professionals across 18 countries and a broad range of industries: the Cisco® Connected World Technology Report (CCWTR). The survey explored their views on the potential and challenges of Big Data and beyond. The survey found that we are still in the early stages of Big Data adoption, and many IT managers feel they are not yet realizing strategic value from their data. You can view some of the top survey results here:
Cisco is also very interested in exploring the possibilities of Data in Motion – the practical uses of data that is often most valuable when interacting in real time. This data is generated by sources such as devices, sensors and video. You can view Cisco’s vision of Data in Motion here:
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