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While Alaska is the largest state, it’s the least densely populated. With local government agencies and departments dispersed across more than 600,000 square miles, creating a reliable and efficient statewide IT infrastructure is no easy feat.

When Corey Kos became the state of Alaska’s enterprise architect in 2010, he set out on a mission to create an infrastructure that would deliver IT services via private cloud, reducing overall expenses and allowing Alaska’s government employees to work efficiently. Three years later Kos has exceeded his objectives and successfully connected ‘The Last Frontier.’ Continue reading “Cloud for Local Government Global Blog Series: Connecting “The Last Frontier”…”



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Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Can you see it? The end is nigh! The end of this blog series, not necessarily “the end” as in AMC’s the Walking Dead sort of end. Are you Zombie stumbling across this blog from a random Google search? Here is a table of contents to help you on your journey as we once again delve into the depths and address another question on our quest to answer… The VDI questions you didn’t ask, but really should have.

You are Invited!  If you’ve been enjoying our blog series, please join us for a free webinar discussing the VDI Missing Questions, with Tony, Doron, Shawn and Jason!  Access the webinar here!

Got RAM? VDI is an interesting beast both from a physical perspective as well as the care and feeding of it. One thing this beast certainly does like is RAM (and braaaiiiins). Just in case I am still being stalked by that tech writer, RAM stands for Random Access Memory. I spoke a bit about Operating Systems in our 5th question in this series, and this somewhat builds upon that in regards to the amount of memory you should use. Microsoft says Windows 7 needs:
1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit). For the purpose of our testing, we went smack in the middle with 1.5GB of RAM. Does it really matter what we used for this testing? It does a little – one, we need to have sufficient resources for the desktop to perform the functions of the workload test, and second, we need to pre-establish some boundaries to measure from.

Calculating overhead. In order to properly account for memory usage, we need to take into account the overhead of certain things in the Hypervisor.  If you want to learn more about calculating overhead, click here.  Here are a couple of things we are figuring in overhead for:

  1. ESXi = 200MB
  2. VM = 29MB for each 1.5GB, 1vCPU Virtual Desktop

Continue reading “VDI “The Missing Questions” #8: How does memory density affect VDI scalability?”



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Shawn Kaiser

Consulting Systems Engineer

Data Center

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6,000 miles away from Cisco headquarters, the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Android was showcased at Samsung’s SAFE™ (Samsung for Enterprise) booth at Mobile World Congress 2013. The SAFE program offers enterprise customers the peace of mind to use Samsung devices for both work and play. As noted in this year’s annual security report, Android malware grew 2577% over 2012. Under the SAFE program, Samsung has built an enterprise mobile ecosystem and partnered with key market leaders to deliver tested enterprise-ready solutions on their portfolio of smart devices. Continue reading “Cisco AnyConnect + SAFE™”



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Apprenticeship programs can be an effective way to employ new IT talent as well as train and develop current IT staff with relevant skills for business success. For most companies, improving business processes at all levels, from manufacturing to sales, is contingent on efficient implementation of technology. Possessing an innovative, well-trained IT staff can become a source of competitive advantage.

Check out this short video about how apprenticeship programs can help develop the necessary IT talent required by companies today and into the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-h2Ma170_g

Continue reading “Apprenticeships Fill the Skills Gap in the UK”



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Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

Vice President and General Manager

Cisco Services

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Editors Note (by Lauren): In the delightful haze of posting a blog at midnight last night, I accidentally posted Eric’s blog to Mobility instead of the Borderless blog. If you came here looking for his full post – you can find it here: http://blogs.cisco.com/borderless/infrastructure-for-megatrends/ and the introduction is below for your reading pleasure.

In my job as Cisco’s Field & Sales CTO for Borderless Networks in the Cisco EMEAR Theatre, I have the privilege of working directly with many Cisco customers and partners. The majority of these folks are what you’d call “Technical Decision Makers” and CTOs.  They’re the IT leaders who do the planning, the strategy, and work on the evolution of their infrastructure.

And frankly, in my 20 years in the IT industry, I have never witnessed such a perfect IT storm!

We are in the midst of a time in IT, where, for most organizations, the current megatrends are having a profound impact on the relevance of their IT. This is felt in both the infrastructure technologies as well as the solutions required to support those megatrends.

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Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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Going Global Delegates at Cisco campus in Dubai

After a very successful Going Global summit, the dust from the dunes of the Dubai dessert has finally settled.  About 1,200 education, industry and government leaders from all over the world joined the sessions at the Dubai’s World Trade Center to reflect on the internationalization of higher education and its impact on the development of 21st century nations. As highlighted in Michael Stevenson’s blog, Cisco had a significant presence as a Gold Sponsor of the summit.

 Firstly, On Monday, March 4,we had the privilege of hosting about 40 delegates from 19 countries at our Cisco campus in Dubai and guide them through our vision for education transformation enabled by technology.

Continue reading “Internationalising Higher Education – Key Learnings from the Going Global Summit 2013”



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It was not that long ago that whenever I read an article about IPv6, it usually discussed how the IPv4 Address depletion in other countries. At that time, the adoption of IPv6 was coming from other countries that where the v4 address space was depleted, the US Government, or Service Provider. Well fast forward only a few years and you can include Enterprise Networks in that mix.

Driving this IPv6 train for enterprise networks is wireless technology and the enabling by-product, BYOD. Wireless technology, in particular, Wi-Fi has grown from a toy to a requirement in most businesses today. We have moved from 802.11b which gave you a max datarate of a paltry 11Mbps to 802.11n to a max datarate of 450Mbps if you currently deploy the Aironet 3600 Access Point that supports 4×4 MIMO; if not, it’s a max datarate of 300Mbps. Never mind the fact that we will soon see the Wave 1 version of 802.11ac will have a datarate of 1.3Gbps and Oh BTW, Wave 2 promises a scorching datarate of 6.9Gbps!

ipv6 bill

Continue reading “Enterprise Networks and the Drive for IPv6”



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Bill Rubino

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networking and Cloud Marketing

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On Engineers Unplugged this week, we are trying something new, a double edition! First up in Episode 5, VCE’s Jay Cuthrell (@qthrul) and Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) talk shop in terms of Automation and the evolution of Open Source, including GitHub, and the role of Community in Tech solving problems. Amazing discussion with practical guidance on how you can get more involved:

Jay Cuthrell and Nick Weaver take the Community Unicorn Challenge!
Jay Cuthrell and Nick Weaver take the Community Unicorn Challenge!

Continue reading “#EngineersUnplugged S2|Eps5-6: #Automation and #KISS, a Double Header!”



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