Avatar

Cisco Champions ask Challenging Questions.  This is the third and final blog in our series presented by Carlos Dominguez and Jimmy Ray Purser. You can read the first blog by Carlos addressing connectivity and the less tech-fortunate here and the second blog by Jimmy Ray on the future of the CCIE here.

I recently had an opportunity to sit down with our Cisco Champions to discuss a range of topics and this was by far the most interesting question as it was inspired by high school students. High school teacher, Hector Albizo’s students wanted to know:

 “What is currently considered the dark side of technology?”

Indeed a great question!  Technology has a ying and yang.  For every good there is a dark side.  Let’s look at history to see examples.  The axe was created for chopping down trees, keeping us warm with fire wood and  building things, all good results that we benefit from.    On the dark side, it became a weapon of war.  The same trend is true for technology. Continue reading “The Dark Side of Technology”



Authors

Jimmy Ray Purser

Former Co-Host of TechWiseTV

No Longer at Cisco

Avatar

For about 2 decades, Fibre Channel has been deployed to support the most rigorous and demanding applications, and  is mainly because FC possesses certain characteristics that enterprise customers embrace, i.e – reliability, performance and scalability.   16Gb Fibre Channel is one of the preferred choice for mission-critical applications that required deterministic low latency networks to connect to storage.   In addition to emerging technologies like FCoE and 40 GE, enterprise customers still continue to deploy Fibre channel for mission critical applications and this trend will continue for a while, due to huge  customer investment in FC infrastructure and how their IT departments are  organized.    According to Dell’Oro report (June, 2013), 38% of data center switch/director ports are projected to be 16 Gb FC during 2014.  

In order to support this demand for 16G, you may expect more product updates and new offerings from Fibre Channel vendors.  For example, EMC announced their new 16G FC storage networking connectivity that further extends EMC’s lead in the market.  Customers can now take advantage and future-proof their virtual data centers by deploying complete, end-to-end 16 Gb Fibre Channel connectivity throughout the cloud.   A couple of months ago Cisco announced high density 16G and FCoE platform –Cisco MDS 9700 director , which delivers superior performance—more than three times the bandwidth than any currently available SAN Director in the market.

Well, I want to be very clear, 16G is one of  several choices, when you are ready for convergence then you will have a choice of platforms that will support FC, FCoE and/or iSCSI, or all three!  You can future proof your storage infrastructure!!! (see figure below).  Cisco MDS 9700 (only director that supports both FC and FCOE in the same platform) + EMC solution enable customers to deploy Teir 1,  16Gb storage infrastructure and scale efficiently.

EMC 16G Conectivity

Continue reading “16 Gb Fibre Channel Market adoptions: EMC 16Gb connectivity (VMAX) announcement”



Authors

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

Avatar

This month marks the three year anniversary of Cisco’s partnership with NetApp and our development of FlexPod.  Over the years, we’ve experienced some tremendous growth, more than doubling new installations year-over-year, and now we have more than 3,000 customers globally.

Following the success of FlexPod Datacenter, FlexPod Express and FlexPod Select the solution is capping off the year with several technology enhancements. These include the automation of integrated infrastructure, business continuity solutions, and validation of new products and reference architectures.

Together, Cisco and NetApp are introducing four new FlexPod components that enable our customers’ continuing journey to the cloud:

  1. UCS Director 4.1 deeply integrated with clustered Data ONTAP.
  2. The addition of Citrix to the FlexPod Cooperative Support program.
  3. FlexPod Datacenter with NetApp MetroCluster
  4. FlexPod Datacenter with Cisco Virtualized Multiservice Data Center 2.3

I encourage you to take a look at the short video we’ve created that gives more details of all the new components we’re announcing today.

https://youtu.be/kAf7o7QtW-U

Our friends at NetApp have written a great  blog post outlining the last two offerings, but I’d like to focus on the first two components – UCS Director and the addition of Citrix capabilities.

UCS Director Integration

New integrations with UCS Director and Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) provide automation and service catalogues, which help customers move toward delivering cloud services. Corporate IT maximizes benefits when its infrastructure can be commissioned within minutes in response to changes in demand. Cisco UCS Director views FlexPod as a single system and allows customers to rapidly deploy FlexPod by leveraging single element managers. UCS Director, in turn, will soon be natively integrated into Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud for a more comprehensive FlexPod cloud management solution.

With the Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) cloud accelerator, UCS Director and FlexPod are integrated as a “node” in the cloud that can be used by cloud administrators to provision NetApp storage into virtual data centers.

Faster with Intel

Rapid deployment will be used to harness tremendous increases in FlexPod computing power. The newest FlexPod deployments will feature Cisco UCS built on Intel’s Ivy Bridge chipset.  We’ve introduced the Intel Xeon Process E5-2600 v2 product family on several servers.

“We like to say that Cisco and Intel are “Joined at the Chip,” because the innovation each company brings is incredibly complimentary. Cisco’s innovation in the data center is an extension of the company’s historic focus: connecting things. Cisco Unified Data Center and products like UCS are the outcomes of our drive to connect the pieces. When we join forces with Intel’s leadership at the computing core, customers see an unbeatable combination.”  –  Todd Brannon, Tick Tock Goes the Server Clock

Coupled with other UCS innovations, the solution has demonstrated great performance versatility and has set record-breaking industry benchmarks.

For enterprises that want to scale out this capacity, Cisco delivers UCS Central. UCS Central software manages multiple, globally distributed Cisco UCS domains with thousands of servers from a single pane.

Adding CItrix

Agile deployment and scale-out performance need the backing of a best-in-class support model. The FlexPod Cooperative Support program brings together the technology expertise of Cisco, NetApp and now Citrix. Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix XenServer and Citrix CloudPlatform are frequently deployed workloads in enterprises today. Customers will have direct access to Cisco, NetApp and Citrix engineers trained to rapidly address any operational issues.  By adding Citrix, FlexPod has the broadest IT and cloud management support, including Citrix CloudPlatform, Microsoft System Center, VMWare vCenter Orchestrator, CA Automation Suite for Clouds, and BMC Cloud Lifecycle Manager.

Combined, these advances in FlexPod technology will enable the platform to exceed the needs of the most demanding private and public cloud deployments.

We’re incredibly proud of the work that Cisco and NetApp have done over the past three years.  We are looking forward to an exciting future together as we use the FlexPod platform to continue delivering significant technology innovations to our customers.

 



Authors

Marcus Phipps

Director

Data Center Solutions Marketing

Avatar

For me, Halloween, October 31st, marks the start of the joyful holiday season.  Continuing onto Thanksgiving and Christmas, this time of year is full of family, friends and relaxation.

For retailers on the other hand, today (technically tomorrow) is the start of a very busy season.  According to NRF (National Retail Federation), it is when retailers get as much as 20-40%* of their sales of the year.  Retailers are measured by multiple factors including sales per square feet.  That means, real estate in a store is very valuable.  Every foot, no, inch counts.

This is where Hugo comes in to discuss this very topic with John Flood, another UCS E-Series expert.  How does UCS E-Series help save space and money for retailers?  Help save time for banks?

Continue reading “Save with UCS E-Series | Inside the Branch”



Authors

Allison Park

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

Avatar

This week I’m at the inaugural Internet of Things World Forum, hosted by Cisco.  To give you a sense of what was discussed in just one day, I thought I’d capture some of the more interesting tweets and stats.  Below the tweets is a fun short video where I interviewed SAP’s Benjamin Wesson and with Cisco’s Monique Morrow!

One – New IoT Division at Cisco!

Continue reading “IoT World Forum Day 1 by the Numbers”



Authors

Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

Avatar

Today’s events at the IoT World Forum included a very interesting keynote address by Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, as well as some exciting breakout sessions. Leading business executives shared their ideas and visions, which in turn are shaping IoT across their industries.

It’s been a special treat to show off the power of the Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution to attendees at the event. We deployed CMX in the beautiful event venue, during John Chambers’ keynote, and during break out sessions. Let’s take a closer look at how attendees have been seeing CMX in action:

IoT Venue: Hotel Arts

IoT World Forum is taking place at the Hotel Arts on the seafront in Barcelona. The lower ground floor houses the Keynote room, the conference rooms, registration, demo showcase and partner rooms.

The latest version of CMX, V7.6, in a pre-release form has been running at the Hotel Arts IoT venue all week. CMX allows organizations to gather and analyze aggregate location data on devices from their Cisco Wi-Fi network. For example, we can see device count and dwell time in total and by location.  The new CMX analytics dashboard (available with CMX 7.6, to be released later this year), looks like this:

iotwf5 Continue reading “Cisco CMX Solution In Action at the Internet of Things World Forum”



Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

Avatar

blogpost2-small

Have you been thinking about becoming more active on Twitter and haven’t gotten around to it yet? Often, it can be difficult to dive in.  I’ve seen this often through planning a department wide social media plan, and I’ve gotten the same questions from both new hires and executives.

Common concerns I’ve heard are:

What do I talk about? Who do I follow? Will I get fired if I tweet the wrong thing?

These questions cause many to push social to the backburner again and again. But don’t quit just yet! The best way to answer these questions is observe and experiment.

These are my personal tips for establishing your profile:

Find social role models.

Look in your organization or industry for someone’s social style that appeals to you. Follow them and see how they set up their tweets. Once you look at a few, you’ll see a simple combination that you can use to model yours after.

Example:

karentweet2

Continue reading “Diving In: A How To Guide to Twitter”



Authors

Anne Autio

No Longer with Cisco

Avatar

If you’re in an SMB company you might think of telepresence as a tool built for enterprise, something that would be nice to have for your small business but just out of reach. You’d be wrong.

Video conferencing solutions like Telepresence and even web-based technologies like WebEx are more affordable than ever, making them a viable option for SMBs.

Read my full article for a closer look!



Authors

Mario Seguin

Unified Communications and TelePresence specialist

SMBs

Avatar

Welcome back to the latest episode of Engineers Unplugged, featuring the inimitable dynamic duo of storage, Vaughn Stewart (@vStewed) and Chad Sakac (@sakacc). They discuss three key trends in storage today: flash, distributed DAS, and software control plane. Storage is the new black, let’s learn why:

And of course, it wouldn’t be complete without a unicorn, a flash unicorn.

Flash Unicorn! Thanks to Vaughn Stewart and Chad Sakac for the artwork.
Flash Unicorn! Thanks to Vaughn Stewart and Chad Sakac for the artwork.

Continue reading “#EngineersUnplugged S4|Ep2: Storage Is the New Black”



Authors