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MGM Resorts in Las Vegas is all about hospitality.

Being one of many major resorts on the renowned Las Vegas Strip, MGM was anxious to connect with guests – and have guests connect to them. They needed to offer something that the competition didn’t. So MGM partnered with Cisco to implement an IT infrastructure that would give guests what they were asking for while also enhancing business-focused technology capabilities. Continue reading “Connections on the Strip – How MGM Upped the Wireless Ante”



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Jaishree Subramania

No Longer with Cisco

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There’s been a great deal of excitement, interest and certainly follow-on questions after we announced our new hybrid cloud integration solution, Nexus 1000V InterCloud. My earlier three-part blog consisted of Part 1 on the architecture and features, Part 2 on the hybrid cloud management specifics, and Part 3 a recap of the frequently asked questions.

And now, we have the video demonstration. At Cisco live! last month in London, TechWise TV‘s Robb Boyd caught up with Prashant Gandhi, Sr. Director of Product Management in our Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, before the trade show floor opened and recorded a demonstration of the new hybrid cloud infrastructure.

In this demo, Prashant quickly migrates a few virtual machines from our simulated private cloud to Amazon Web Services hosting servers. Part of the ease of use is through integration of Cisco’s Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC) InterCloud to Amazon cloud management tools, and the ability to view and manage virtual machines in both the private data center as well as those hosted in the cloud. The other important point about Nexus 1000V InterCloud is not only how it provides all the seamless layer 2 connectivity and security to connect the data center to public cloud resources quickly and easily, but security and application policies can be mirrored and migrated just as easily in the public cloud through the use and deployment of Cisco Cloud Network Services, such as our Virtual Security Gateway, the ASA 1000V Cloud Firewall or vWAAS. Take it away Robb and Prashant…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv7Z-Np8yow



Authors

Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

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At Cisco Live London, Cisco unveiled  Wired & Wireless convergence, along with its associated products, the Wireless LAN Controller 5760 and the Catalyst Switch 3850 with built-in Wireless Controller. While on the expo floor explaining the newly introduced ‘converged access’ to our customers, I had some interesting conversations that I thought might be cool to share with you. There may be some paraphrasing here, but if my conversation became a screenplay, it would have looked like this:

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The Cisco Live! London expo show floor is throbbing with excitement, customers browse the many demos that are around the World of Solutions arena.

NAT, Wireless Controller 5760 Product Manager, stands at a demo booth with the new controller.

CUSTOMER 1 ambles over.

CUSTOMER 1

I heard about the converged access and it sounds very interesting. Why should I consider 5760 controller?

NAT

Do you have bandwidth hungry applications such as video / multimedia  applications used by your wireless users?

Continue reading “On Converged Access & Wireless Controller 5760: A Screenplay”



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From super storms to snow storms, the U.S. has experienced its share of extreme winter weather over the past few months – evidenced today by the revelations from my family in #Snowklahoma. The damage left by recent blizzards, Hurricane Sandy and the Nemo Storm has businesses and residents rethinking ways to ensure continuity during severe weather.

For government agencies, businesses and even schools in some cases, teleworking (or telecommuting) is a popular solution that allows continuity of operations (COOP) while keeping employees out of harm’s way during natural disasters. In contrast to the Yahoo announcement today, many agencies, organizations and teams rely on telework to keep employee productivity high regardless of weather, travel delays or other conditions. Continue reading “Extreme Weather Ramps up Need for Federal Teleworking”



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Today Paul Perez, Vice President and CTO of Cisco’s Data Center Group joined on stage downtown San Francisco Boyd A. Davis, Intel Architecture Group Vice President and GM, Data Center Software Division  to announce a proposed  extension of the alliance between Cisco and Intel into Big Data .

Over the past months, our readers had the opportunity to appreciate the growing investment of Cisco in this market frequently articulated by our experts Raghunath Nambiar  and Jacob Rapp  through blog postings and speaking at industry events.

Cisco and Intel have worked together for years to deliver enterprise solutions that improve performance and enable organizations to deliver new services. As we have stated several times recently , Intel has been a critical partner and significant contributor to the phenomenal success of the Cisco UCS. So it will not come as a surprise to anybody that Cisco and Intel are looking to  partner again to offer you a leading Big Data solution.

In this video, Cisco Paul Perez and Intel Boyd Davis explained how Cisco will support the Intel distribution of Apache Hadoop on UCS, and how both companies intend to collaborate to address the growing Big Data needs of our joint customers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koaf_YQibik

Please read the Intel announcement and stay tuned for a more detailed and technical  blog by Raghunath Nambiar.



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I’m not a doctor…but I am a patient.

I’m also a keen observer of the world around me—especially when it involves my health.

For many healthcare professionals, I believe the recent challenges surrounding the industry have taken some of the enjoyment out of their work. Issues such as new and changing regulations, increased lawsuits, escalating costs, and barely manageable patient loads, among others, have all taken their toll on the doctors, nurses, and administrators who, I believe, entered the healthcare field to have a fulfilling, lifelong career serving people and helping them live better lives.

This situation presents a real issue for literally everyone fortunate enough to have access to modern healthcare. Population growth and aging populations in many countries around the world mean we need more healthcare professionals, not fewer. Happier, more productive doctors and nurses mean better care for their patients. And, people who dedicate years of their lives to practice medicine should have a satisfying work experience.

In the United States, demand for physicians will outpace supply by 130,000 by 2025 (Source: AAMC Center for Workforce Studies, 2011)
In the United States, demand for physicians will outpace supply by 130,000 by 2025 (Source: AAMC Center for Workforce Studies, 2011)

For healthcare professionals (and the rest of us), I have great news—we are at the cusp of a renaissance in healthcare. Technology—including the Internet of Everything (IoE), robotics, 3-D printing, wearable technology, cloud, mobility, and many others—promises to usher in this new era in healthcare. In short, the best is yet to come.

HIMMScomp4[1]

To make my point, here are a couple of examples that I believe will transform healthcare over the next 10 years. (For those of you attending the HIMSS13 conference March 3-7, I will be presenting several more examples in my keynote speech.) Continue reading “Ushering in the New Era of Healthcare”



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After a few months of work, I’m happy to announce Cisco has contributed the LISP protocol upstream into the Open vSwitch project. LISP is an open protocol developed by the IETF LISP Working Group. By getting LISP upstream into Open vSwitch, Cisco is continuing it’s tradition of enabling Open Standards by contributing to Open Source projects. What makes LISP interesting in the context of Open vSwitch is the fact it’s a pure L3 tunneling technology, the first in Open vSwitch. The current LISP code in Open vSwitch requires the use of static LISP tunnel endpoints. The instructions in the README file detail how to configure and use LISP tunnels in Open vSwitch. We have plans to remove the requirement for the static tunnels going forward. But for now, people who would like to experiment with LISP tunnels in Open vSwitch can use git to pull the latest master and give it a try. Feedback on the Open vSwitch dev mailing list is appreciated!



Authors

Kyle Mestery

TECHNICAL LEADER.ENGINEERING

Office of the Cloud CTO

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Cisco and VMware share a long track record of joint innovation and integrated solution development, providing differentiated capabilities and benefits for our partners and customers. Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a great example of technology that raises the performance bar and dramatically simplifies the data center operational environment by delivering a compute platform purpose-built with scalable virtualization in mind. Meanwhile, VMware Horizon View is uniquely suited to delivering a total desktop virtualization solution that simplifies IT management, increases security and increases control of end-user access while centrally delivering desktop services from the cloud, which drives down costs.

When you pair Cisco UCS with VMware Horizon View-you get the best of both worlds: truly scalable, easy to manage, end-to-end solutions that dramatically improve price-to-performance ratios for desktop virtualization deployments.

Large enterprises began adopting Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as customers sought more secure, scalable and cost-effective means to deliver desktop workspaces to end-users. These days, VDI helps enterprises support growing trends like Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD), or as some of our VMware friends call it, Spend-Your-Own-Money (SYOM). As a result, Cisco and VMware have been successfully delivering VDI solutions to enterprise customers for the last two years.

But what we’ve heard from you, our trusted channel partner community, is that it’s harder to build the business case for VDI with customers who are in the midmarket space. Not only do these customers have fewer seats to virtualize, but they’re also usually without the resources or time to decipher how all of the moving parts associated with VDI fit together. How do we enable them to benefit from VDI without the significant CAPEX hurdle, or the costs associated with scaling once their needs grow? And how do we provide them with simpler, more cost efficient solutions?

Check out how partners benefit from a tremendous midmarket VDI opportunity.  Continue reading “New Midmarket VDI Solutions For Cisco and VMware Partners”



Authors

Rick Snyder

Senior Vice President

Americas Partner Organization

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This post is included  as part of a series related to social media training efforts underway at Cisco.  I sat down with Mark Traphagen  and Phil Buckley of Virante to ask a few specific questions around social media and how social media interacts with search engine  marketing and optimization.  This is the first of two parts for this interview.  

HAK51746What impact does Social Media have on Search Engines?

The first search engines were little more than human-fed directories.  As the web took off, trying to human index it became unworkable, for obvious reasons.  By far the most obvious and dramatic effect is seen in the growing personalization of search results. Since at least 2007, Google results have been influenced more and more by the searcher’s location, past search history, and how she interacts with web sites, among other factors. With Google’s introduction of Search Plus Your World in early 2011, social network influence came front and center.

Now by default if a searcher is logged in to Google while searching, her results are heavily influenced by Google contacts, including Gmail contacts and people circled on Google+.  Bing has begun a similar effort incorporating a user’s Facebook friends. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, revolutionized web search with their invention of the PageRank algorithm, which counts links between sites as “votes” and weighs those votes by relative authority.  When the social web emerged, Google and other search engines realized that social interactions online could provide a new source of signals, a way to diversify the signal set and augment or confirm the signals being sent by links.  Since then, they have been slowly increasing the amount of effect that social signals have on search results.

Continue reading “The Social Media Play on Search Engines”