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By now, given all the launch and blogging activity activity over the past week or so, I am sure your understanding of and interest in Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) will have grown.   Many of you will be asking “how do I get started as quickly as possible?”, and “how can I free up some time and resources to investigate?”  You understand the “what” – now, as I blogged recently on SDN, it’s time to understand more about the “why” and take action on the “how”.   How then do you get off that start line as quickly as possible?

Get Set To Go With ACI
Get Set To Go With ACI

As with many things in life, it helps if you get help from someone who has “been there” and “done that”.  And that’s where Cisco Services comes in, as Scott Clark, the VP for our Data Center Services team, introduced  last week.  So let’s talk about why Cisco Services should be your partner in this application centric world, and what services can help you.

Continue reading “The Quickest Way To Get Started with ACI”



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Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

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Previously, we saw how Boeing division (BDS) and University of Siegen have deployed Multi-hop FCoE and realized significant benefits. This blog highlights similar benefits achieved by Engineering Shared Infrastructure Services (ESIS) department at Netapp.

NetappNetapp’s ESIS department delivers and maintains end-to-end compute, storage, and network resources for internal Development and Quality Assurance engineers. These resources provide a platform for the innovation that creates storage systems and software, ultimately empowering NetApp customers around the world to store, manage, protect, and retain their data. The requirement was to have agility and versatility in providing storage connectivity between rack/blade Cisco UCS servers and NetApp clustered Data ONTAP storage arrays.

So, Netapp ESIS implemented an integrated model using Cisco Unified Fabric that supports FCoE from the UCS Servers through the Nexus Series Switches all the way to NetApp storage controllers.

Netapp-deploy-2

This Unified Fabric architecture reduced the number of management points and provided easy scalability. The TCO benefits were quite significant – Netapp saved $300K in the hardware costs, more than $80,000 in the implementation costs and 1/3 of an FTE’s time Continue reading “Who’s deploying Multi-hop FCoE? – Part III”



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I am attending South Korea’s Big Data Forum in Seoul, and one question here is, “How big is Big Data?” My friend and colleague Dave Evans has pointed out that by the end of this year, more data will be created every 10 minutes than in the entire history of the world up to 2008. Now, that’s big!

Much of this data is being created by billions of sensors that are embedded in everything from traffic lights and running shoes to medical devices and industrial machinery—the backbone of the Internet of Things (IoT). But the real value of all this data can be realized only when we look at it in the context of the Internet of Everything (IoE). While IoT enables automation through machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, IoE adds the elements of “people” and “process” to the “data” and “things” that make up IoT. Analytics is what brings intelligence to these connections, creating endless possibilities.

To understand why, let’s step back and take a look at the classic approach to Big Data and analytics. Traditionally, organizations have tended to store all the data they collect from various sources in centralized data centers. With this model, if a retailer wants to know something about the buying patterns of a certain store’s customers, it can create an analysis of loyalty card purchases based on data in the data warehouse. Collecting, cleansing, overlaying, and manipulating this data takes time. By the time the analysis is run, the customer has already left the store.

Big Data today is characterized by volume, variety, and velocity. This phenomenon is putting a tremendous strain on the centralized model, as it is no longer feasible to duplicate and store all that data in a centralized data warehouse. Decisions and actions need to take place at the edge, where and when the data is created; that is where the data and analysis need to be as well. That’s what Cisco calls “Data in Motion.” With sensors gaining more processing power and becoming more context-aware, it is now possible to bring intelligence and analytic algorithms close to the source of the data, at the edge of the network. Data in Motion stays where it is created, and presents insights in real time, prompting better, faster decisions.

Continue reading “Big Data: Not Just Big, but Fast and Smart, Too”



Authors

Nicola Villa

Managing Director, Global Analytics Practice

Cisco Consulting Services

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In my last blog post, I discussed how mobile collaboration is bringing flexibility to the manufacturing industry, offering transformational benefits in a variety of functional areas including R&D, operations, customer service and sales. Today, I want to take a deeper dive into not just how collaboration can reduce cost, but how it offers manufacturers the potential for real revenue growth.

Mobility Makes Real-time Impact_Cisco Manufacturing

The Opportunity
Along with rapid acceleration of the bring your own device phenomenon and the forecast that there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita by 2017, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the manufacturing workforce is evolving and going mobile.  Yet, many manufacturers are still trying to substantively leverage collaboration and take full advantage of its benefits in a way that impacts the bottom line.

One key opportunity is to use collaboration to better connect product experts and customers. However, without effective collaboration tools, it can be difficult for sales to broker this communication. Mobility solutions enable sales teams and customers services reps efficient access to newly connected plant floor expertise, helping facilitate customer product questions in real time via phone call, text, e-mail or even videoconference. Not only is customer satisfaction improved, but also sales conversion rates increase when the salesperson or service rep secures answers to difficult customer questions before the competition can.

Continue reading “How Collaboration is Increasing Revenue for Manufacturers”



Authors

Jason Pates

Manufacturing Lead, Customer Business Transformation

Cisco Consulting Services

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What will the future be like? As depicted in today’s popular movies and books, the future is either one of bright promise—where the world’s greatest problems have been solved by technology and greater human enlightenment—or it’s a dystopian world where today’s problems have only gotten worse, technology has gone bad, and the very survival of humanity is at risk.

As Cisco’s chief futurist, it’s my job to think about what the world will look like in a few years, and how our actions today will impact that future. And while I’m not ready to put on my rose-colored glasses just yet, I do have an optimistic view of what the future may bring, enabled by the Internet of Everything (IoE). Within 10 years, there will be 50 billion connected things in the world, with trillions of connections among them. These connections will change the world for the better in ways we can’t even imagine today. But here are just a few things I can imagine:

Better supply of food: Sensors all along the food supply chain, together with Big Data analytics and the intelligence of the cloud, will help us optimize the delivery of food from “farm to fork.” Sensors in the field will be combined with weather forecasts and other data to trigger irrigation and harvest times for each crop. And sensors on the food itself will alert merchants and consumers about when the “sell by” and “use by” dates are approaching to prevent spoilage. All of this will significantly reduce food waste—which today amounts to about one-third of total world food production.

Better supply of water: Similarly, about 30 percent of our water supply is lost due to leaks and waste. Just one faucet or leaky pipe dripping three times a minute will waste more than 100 gallons of water a year. “Smart” pipes can reduce this waste significantly by sensing and pinpointing the location of leaks that would otherwise go undetected for months or years.

Better access to education: Affordable access to education is one of the most important ways to lift people out of poverty. Soon, time and distance will no longer limit access to an engaging, affordable, high-quality education. With connection speeds going up, and equipment costs going down, distance learning is going beyond traditional online classes to create widely accessible immersive, interactive, real-time learning experiences.

Better access to healthcare: Urbanization and population growth are putting a strain on healthcare resources—especially in rural areas. After the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, Cisco was a strategic partner in creating a networked medical delivery system, including four telehealth networks that allow doctors to meet with and examine patients remotely. But those capabilities are just the beginning of what IoE will make possible. Soon, women with high-risk pregnancies will be able to wear a tiny, always-on fetal monitoring electronic “tattoo,” which will communicate to the cloud whenever the woman is within range of a wireless network. The analytics capabilities in the cloud will alert doctors at the first sign of trouble, and even tell the mother-to-be when she needs to drink more water, or get more rest.

While sensors and machine-to-machine communication are important parts of these solutions, it’s not just the “Internet of Things” that is making all of this possible—it’s the Internet of Everything—the networked connection of people, process, data, and things. And Big Data analytics is what brings the intelligence to all of these connections, enabling new kinds of processes, and helping us make smarter decisions.

I’ve highlighted just four areas where IoE will change the world for the better. But there is not a single part of life that will not be impacted in some way—whether that means improving your drive to work, speeding you through the checkout line at the grocery store, saving energy through smart lighting, or minimizing your wait at a traffic light. The Internet of Everything is not a silver bullet that can solve all the world’s woes, but with the spark of human innovation, IoE can be the engine for a better future.



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In Sao Paulo, GVT TV needed a way to protect its satellite-delivered video content.

In New Delhi, direct broadcast satellite provider Tata Sky needed a way to outfit its customers to stream video to IP-connected screens.

In Mexico, Megacable — the first in the country to launch broadband Internet over cable, needed to build the back-end video acquisition and distribution for an IP-based on-demand service to tablets and connected devices.

And in Germany, Deutsche Telekom needed a better view into its CDN (content delivery network), and a way to bridge into its “Entertain To Go” package of TV Everywhere content.

In all four cases, core components of Cisco’s Videoscape portfolio rose to the challenge: GTV TV selected our Videoscape VideoGuard® Smart Cards. GVT’s service footprint spans 146 cities in Brazil, and expanding.

Tata Sky deployed our Videoscape Video Everywhere technology — a Continue reading “Videoscape Helps Customers in India, Mexico, Brazil and Germany Deliver New Connected Video Experiences”



Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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register for webinarsThere is no denying the changing role of IT. The traditional govern and build approach is too slow for the new world of cloud and mobile computing.  IT departments, who once carefully metered out which services they would offer and how they would be delivered, are now being led by a completely new set of drivers.

The model has been upended: employees and customers now decide by proxy what they want and it falls upon IT to scramble and deliver it instantly.  These days the face of the technologist is your average high school student, retail shopper, hotel guest, hospital patient, and even branch office employee.   This “consumerization of IT” has transformed these beings into powerful, roaming, high-octane data seekers assuming connectivity at all times. In essence, they expect access to any application on any device from anywhere with a high quality experience. Continue reading “Designing the Next Generation Branch for Business Impact”



Authors

Raakhee Mistry

Senior Director

EN & Cloud Marketing

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Today’s guest post comes from Dr. Joshua Hursey, an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse.

For a number of years, developers tuning High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and libraries have been harnessing server topology information to significantly optimize performance on servers with increasingly complex memory hierarchies and increasing core counts.  Tools such as the Portable Hardware Locality (hwloc) project provide these applications with abstract, yet detailed, information of the single-server topology.  But that is where the topology analysis often stops — neglecting the one of the largest components of the HPC environment, namely: the network.

Continue reading “The Network Locality Project (netloc)”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software