Okay, I have a confession to make.
I’ve been somewhat amused by Brocade’s recent “Gen 5” Fibre Channel campaign. After all, the idea that “we’re going to simply call 16G Fibre Channel something other than 16G Fibre Channel and pretend that people will not figure out that it’s really just 16G Fibre Channel” is, well, amusing!
Continue reading “Fibre Channel Standards, Speeds and Feeds, and Generation “X””
Successful IT managers today and in the future need to quickly adapt to changing business strategies. But how does IT increase efficiency, support more applications and provide additional services with flat or decreasing IT budgets?
In my previous blog, I discussed how Cisco, EMC, NetApp, and VCE introduced converged infrastructures to increase IT efficiency and significantly reduce data center costs. I also addressed the breakdown of IT time and resources between management and maintenance (75 percent) and value-add services (25 percent). So how does IT flip that ratio and spend more time on innovation and less on routine administration?
Watch our new video to learn how Cisco Cloupia—through automated, comprehensive management of converged infrastructure solutions based on Cisco UCS and Nexus—empowers IT to better align quickly with business strategy. By doing so, the software helps drive a positive shift in that 75:25 ratio, providing infrastructure administrators with greater agility and flexibility.
There are a number of converged infrastructure management solutions, but Cisco Cloupia is unique in the industry by delivering:
•Simplicity
In less than 4 hours, you can be experiencing the benefits of automated converged infrastructure management with Cisco Cloupia. The solution installs in less than 1 hour without any service engagement. (In one of our labs at Cisco, the solution was installed in 15 minutes.) Following installation and 2-3 hours of training, conducted by our partners, you can be experiencing all the benefits of the software.
•Comprehensive Management
Cisco Cloupia is the only solution on the market today that manages the leading converged infrastructures from Cisco, EMC, NetApp, and VCE from the same management console. Today’s data centers are heterogeneous, and management tools need to accommodate multiple vendor solutions. Cisco Cloupia enables you to choose the best converged infrastructure solution to meet your business requirements.
•Single pane of glass
Using one tool that manages both physical and virtual compute, network, storage, and virtualization reduces complexity and training time for your staff, helping drive that shift in the 75:25 ratio towards innovation.
•Model-based orchestration
Cisco Cloupia’s unique model-based orchestration enables IT teams to build and execute repeatable physical and virtual infrastructure workflows without complex custom scripts and expensive system integration engagements.
•Greater IT Management and Control
Cisco Cloupia can manage multi-tenant or secure multi-tenant environments, permitting virtualized and non-virtualized workloads to securely run side-by-side while their associated resources remain independent.
As data centers seek to innovate and meet changing business requirements, they need automation and management to ensure that they experience the full potential of their converged infrastructure. These are just some of the ways that Cisco Cloupia can help. To learn more, go here.
On March 12th, Cisco announced the ISR-AX and how Cisco is changing the game, reducing complexity and making it simpler for enterprises to deliver and manage application delivery to users. Cisco is expanding the role of our Integrated Service Routers (ISRs) to deliver application-centric networks that provide granular visibility, control, and optimization without additional devices or bandwidth upgrades – Cisco® Application Experience (AX) Router family is now a part of the ISR family of routers! The Cisco ISR-AX Routers directly integrate Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), Application Visibility and Control (AVC), Data/IPBase and Security services into a platform that is simple to order, configure, and deploy for secure, optimized cloud connectivity and branch-office routing. The Cisco ISR G2 and ISR-AX Routers are based on the same hardware and software that you know and love and are deploying today. Today I wanted to go into the technical details of each of the components. Continue reading “Cisco ISR-AX is Now a Part of the Integrated Services Router Family!”
The attacks against South Korean media and banking organizations last week severely disrupted a handful of organizations with a coordinated distribution of “wiper” malware designed to destroy data on hard drives and render them unbootable. At 14:00 KST on March 20, 2013, the wiper was triggered across three media organizations and four banks, setting off a firestorm of speculation and finger-pointing and that which continues as of this writing. In this post, I’ll share a perspective no one else seems to be talking about, but may be the real motivation behind these attacks.
The What and the Possible Why
Let’s start with what we know:
While the “what” of the attack is well established, the “why” and “how” are still a matter of debate. Theories postulated include an outright act of warfare from North Korea designed to economically disrupt South Korea, or an act of sabotage to cover the tracks of data exfiltration allegedly wrought by China. But what if there were an explanation that was less about countries and politics and more about that all-time motivator of crime: money? Consider, if you will, the following timeline. Continue reading “Thoughts on DarkSeoul: Data Sharing and Targeted Attackers”
Another week of all the technology that’s fit to whiteboard, Engineers Unplugged features Chris Wahl (@chriswahl) and Steve Kaplan (@ROIDude) talking through cloud stack options, including Cisco Cloupia and Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) as well as VMware’s vCloud Director (vCD) and vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). It’s ___aaS in the new cloud world. Great conversation from the partner perspective. Here we go:
Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:
- Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
- Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
- Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
- Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
- Practice drawing unicorns
Join the conversation by following @ciscoDC on Twitter. For outtakes, unicorn photo albums, and more, like the Engineers Unplugged Facebook page.
I have been working for Cisco for over 15 years, much of that time as a Consulting Engineer for Routing and Switching.
I understand strengths and weakness of routing, the value of a good hierarchical design…. But what’s worse than having an end-user having problems with one of his business application and being unable to provide an answer? Yes we have traceroute, ping and other fancy networking tools but nowadays we have to deal with applications and user experience. We have to move forward and take into account the performance of an application rather than just forwarding packets based on static cost metrics. It’s not just about connectivity anymore.
Therefore I’ve moved to the Application Visibility and Control (AVC) group in Engineering. It’s like jumping from standard L3 to advanced L4-L7 kind of routing.
I know what you may be thinking when you read these lines … yet another new acronym. We have the good old routing protocols, why should I care about this new AVC? Continue reading “Are You Ready for Performance Routing?”
Today, Cisco is celebrating a milestone in its commitment to helping you act on security intelligence—our 10th bundle of Cisco IOS Software Security Advisories. We’re proud of our commitment to these predictable disclosures (on the fourth Wednesday of March and September annually) because they originated as a direct response to your feedback. Bundled publications allow you to plan ahead and ensure resources are available to analyze, test, and remediate vulnerabilities in your environments. In an upcoming post, my colleague John Stuppi will share how the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) drove the evolution from a traditional disclosure model to the current semiannual bundled publication. John’s post will also provide another vehicle to share feedback with PSIRT, the organization that manages the receipt, investigation, and public reporting of security vulnerability information that is related to Cisco products and networks.
Make sure you take a look at the Cisco Event Response—our “go to” document that correlates the full array of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) resources for this bundle (including links to the advisories, mitigations, Cisco IntelliShield Alerts, CVSS scores, and OVAL content). Remember, this collateral is not unique to Cisco IOS Software Security Advisories but is part of Cisco SIO’s response to current security events.
Today’s edition of the Cisco IOS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication includes seven advisories that affect the following technologies:
Segment routing (SR) is a concept that’s been working its way through the IETF standards process but is finally becoming ready for real world deployment. It’s a network technology that provides enhanced packet forwarding behavior while minimizing the need for maintaining awareness of mass volumes of network state. SR satisfies essential requirements for application-enabled routing in software defined networks, including the ability to provide strict network performance guarantees, efficient use of network resources and very high scalability for application-based transactions. Segment Routing relies on a small number of extensions to IS-IS and OSPF and can operate with an MPLS or an IPv6 data plane and integrates with the rich multi-service capabilities of MPLS such as L3VPN, VPWS, VPLS, E-VPN, etc.
With Continue reading “Segment Routing: Impact on Software Defined Networks”
With the ever growing demands placed on IT organizations to “do more with less” it is becoming apparent that the way we deploy the network infrastructure, how we administer policies and how we manage the whole thing needs to evolve.
Why is IT spending so much time maintaining separate wired, wireless and VPN networks? We need to focus on the business that is banging on the door telling you to support more mobile and wired devices, more bandwidth hungry applications and extend that support well beyond the walls of corporate facilities.
How can we simplify how IT operates and still deliver a high-performance, high-quality connected experience? Cisco Unified Access can help! We announced the webinar series earlier this week, and part 1 is just around the corner.
In next Wednesday’s webinar (CLICK TO REGISTER) we will discuss:
Continue reading “Activate the IT Transformation with Cisco Unified Access: Part 1”
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