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Cisco Champions ask Challenging Questions.  This is the second in a blog series presented by Carlos Dominguez and Jimmy Ray Purser.  Check out the first blog by Carlos here

I recently had an opportunity to sit down with our Cisco Champions to discuss a range of topics about technology.  Here’s a question that was top of mind for Edward Henry:  

“The CCIE is easily recognized as one of the most elite certifications in the industry. It’s currently turned 20 years old, where do you see the program in 5 or 10 more years?”

What a great question! Let’s take a quick look at why the CCIE program was created.  Cisco announced the CCIE program on Sept. 27, 1993, in a press release  where John Chambers, said:

“The CCIE Program begins where other vendors’ certification programs leave off. It can be compared to completing a university course versus taking college entrance exams. Prospective CCIE candidates must be highly qualified just to enter the program, and then, after taking an intensive troubleshooting course, must pass a rigorous hands-on lab test conducted by senior support engineers. This very stringent set of requirements ensures that only the best professionals are selected.” Continue reading “Built Cisco-Tough CCIE is 20 years strong”



Authors

Jimmy Ray Purser

Former Co-Host of TechWiseTV

No Longer at Cisco

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Jasmine-web-2This piece was authored by guest blogger Jasmin Herro, founder and CEO of Outback Global Australia and vice president of Outback Global USA. Outback Global is an Indigenous-owned business certified with Supply Nation, along with Cisco Australia, which is also a member. Supply Nation is an organization dedicated to growing diversity within the supply chain

 

I woke up one morning and suddenly realized I was an entrepreneur!

Those who know me, even for a short time, realize that I am an ideas person, I am constantly thinking, joining the proverbial dots, making connections and never taking myself too seriously. Every day starts at 5:30 a.m. and ends the next morning around 1 a.m., or when I drag myself to bed after falling asleep at my desk.

There are things that constantly go through my mind, random sets of ideas that could at any moment be the next big thing. Was I always like this? I remember, as an 8-year-old child needing money to go to the annual fair and thinking that if I could convince Glen, the man who worked for my dad, to help me pick all the mandarins off the two big trees in our yard, I could sell them in my dad’s petrol station. After some gentle persuasion (begging), Glen harvested all the mandarins off both trees and I convinced him to help me set up a table at the petrol station with a sign that read “Mandarins 10 cents or 6 for 50 cents.” After 2 days I made $23 and with my best puppy dog eyes offered half the money to Glen. He of course declined but offered to make me an extension arm so I could reach the top of the trees and pick the mandarins myself the next year.  This was my first taste of entrepreneurial creativity and from then on I’ve looked for value and opportunity in everything around me.

Continue reading “Supplier Diversity Programs Bring Out the Entrepreneur Within”



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Manager

Cisco Corporate Affairs

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Are your finances secure with your financial institution? Vystar Credit Union in Florida, USA speaks out on one of their recent efforts to ensure highly secure access at their institution. With the pressures of compliance and the need to protect their institution’s network and assets, Vystar deploys ISE and AnyConnect with great success. Most recently coming from Gartner IT conference in FLA I had a chance to speak with other organizations that expressed secure access concerns. Continue reading “A Financial Service Organization Speaks Out on Secure Access”



Authors

Kathy Trahan

Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager

Global Marketing Corporate Communications

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More than 99 percent of things in the physical world are still not connected to the Internet. The Internet of Everything (IoE) has the potential to connect the unconnected, thereby opening up unprecedented opportunities. But, it’s not just things that are connected to the Internet. People, such as athletes, are looking to utilize technology, such as our IoE, to improve their performances.

Verizon re-launched on Oct. 8 the Verizon Innovation Center West in downtown San Francisco. The newly-expanded Innovation Center is comprised of collaborative lab environments, private lab space, demonstration and seminar areas, as well as office space that engineers and member companies can utilize to work with others to advance wireless technologies.

Several new and beta technology demonstrations are on display at the innovation center.

One application is the “Connected Athlete” (see photo below), Continue reading “Verizon and Cisco Showcase New Technologies at Verizon Innovation Center West”



Authors

Kelly Ahuja

Senior Vice President

Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions

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Companies today are facing an increasingly competitive environment and continue to look for points of differentiation in their markets. The SAN/Storage continues to play a vital role in enabling businesses to adopt new technologies and applications to help them grow.  Software Defined Storage (SDS) / Software Defined Network (SDN) is positioned as one of the approach to gain efficiency and increase service velocity in the data center. SDS/SDN helps customers to keep up with the pace of change made possible by the virtualization of other data center resources and is a perfect complement to SDN.

EMC introduced their Software-defined storage, EMC ViPR — that offers a revolutionary approach to storage automation and management to transform existing heterogeneous storage into a simple, extensible, and open virtual storage platform.

Cisco is working closely with EMC to integrate Cisco MDS 9000 platform with EMC ViPR Software Defined Storage platforms. Cisco MDS 9000 provides industry leading performance, reliability, multiprotocol storage and supports extensive set of open API – those set of open API’s enable tight integration with EMC ViPR, as a result provide operational flexibility and agility by pooling storage assets, centralizing storage management, automating provisioning and delivering open API’s for our common customers.

To learn more, please view this video – where Rajeev Bhardwaj, Vice President of Product Management of Data Center explains the tight integration between Cisco MDS and EMC Viper and helps our common customers to simplify storage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUkUeIBXaAE&feature=share&list=PLbssOJyyvHuW1TAxMzVd8PF4aQPZk5Mb6

 

Continue reading “EMC ViPR: Transforming the datacenter with Software Defined Storage”



Authors

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

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As the Internet of Everything continues to progress and more people, process, data and things begin to connect to each other, it’s getting easier to see how the future will fit together. The pieces of the IoE puzzle will no longer be disparate things, but a single, connected unit with technology at the core.

A great way to demonstrate this connection is to think of everyday situations. A child’s big game is important to any parent, and the CFO of a Fortune 500 company is no exception. But when the CFO is double booked with a meeting and his son’s big soccer game, he might worry how to balance his life at home with his life at work. Thanks to IoE, he doesn’t have to choose.

The Internet of Everything connects the CFO’s phone and car, which communicate to keep him on a conference call with his sales team while he travels to the field. He knows that when home phones become work phones – thanks in part to technology like Cisco Connected Mobile Experience – work can fit in anywhere. At the field, his connected tablet provides updates on the real-time sales data of products sold nationwide. Instead of having to step aside from the game to check in with the office, the CFO can watch his company break the all-time sales record as it happens, virtually with his sales team via Cisco WebEx, while celebrating his son’s win, in person on the sidelines.

And that is just the beginning. Imagine that the soccer ball is instrumented to provide feedback to individual children, helping them to improve their game, while at the same time providing the coach with play-by-play replays on his tablet. Video feeds of the game can be sent to grandmothers in other states so they can watch their grandchildren play. And as the play clock ticks down, uniforms monitor the kids’ vitals to ensure no one gets dehydrated, sending alerts to the parent volunteers when a child needs an extra water break.

This is the kind of experience the Internet of Everything is making possible. Explore the interactive image above to learn more. No longer must people choose between things such as work and play. IoE is integrating the two, creating opportunities for flexibility, security and real-time success.

Tell me, how can you see IoE making a difference in your world? Leave a comment here or join the conversation on Twitter to add your thoughts.



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We have to propel new use cases for cloud because customers want more than IaaS. And they don’t want to be tied to vendors’ annual product release cycles to get it. But, as they extend cloud-based service delivery beyond IaaS and aim higher in the sky, their heads smack into the ceiling of cloud management. Naturally, they want to prevent the ensuing organizational concussion—the confusion, the fuzziness, the regrouping. So they are turning to Cisco for more flexible and extensible cloud management capabilities. Ask and you shall receive.

In a previous blog I explained how Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) can scale from single to multi-cloud deployments in addition to expanding into the richer application sets. Our support for the why wait if you don’t have to philosophy has created the cloud accelerator program for Cisco IAC. Cloud accelerators prevent those concussions. They are content modules, or cartridges, that insert into the IAC framework. Developers use them to test new application capabilities and deploy them into production, all without costly architectural revisions.

Cisco now gives you two new cloud accelerators: Application Stack Accelerator and Cisco UCS Director Accelerator.

Application Stack Accelerator
This module provides a blueprint designer onto which stack designers create whole application stacks or platforms to their precise specification, allowing consumption through Cisco IAC. This accelerator mirrors the software development process, allowing:

o Blueprint creation
o Blueprint testing
o Blueprint revision based on test results
o Review and approval
o Publication for consumption

An edit-and-copy function is available when hypervisor-specific blueprints are required or new blueprints need to be created with servers in the same network zone.

Cisco UCS Director Accelerator
Managing infrastructure within the whole cloud context is a success factor for cloud. Therefore, this accelerator lets Cisco IAC discover Cisco UCS Director as a node in the cloud and then provision physical NAS storage into an existing virtual data center—specifically NetApp storage. When applications need additional capacity, cloud administrators can add it using the IAC management portal. You will hear about the integration between Cisco IAC and UCS Director and our unified management approach over the next 60 days.

Cisco has transformed cloud management and the new-release waiting game for the better.

Cisco IAC is proving that organizations no longer need to hit their head on the cloud management ceiling and risk concussion.

To learn about Cisco IAC, go here
Click here to learn more about cloud accelerators. First time visitors will need to register.



Authors

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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Video based services have become a strong focus point of today’s business and personal needs. Whilst low-resolution video services with limited immersive capabilities have been around for two decades, the technology and infrastructure has finally grown to a point where services requiring good, or excellent, user experience can be delivered in an optimal manner.

Furthermore, the evolution of the office space from centralised and corporate owned employee application devices to a flexible Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach is moving the trust model from physical devices to application-based authentication, thereby increasing the need to redefine the rules for video delivery.

These changes are putting pressure on network infrastructures to keep up with the growth of those services.

I have therefore asked Thomas Kernen, Consulting Systems Engineer, to provide me with some insight into those changes. Thomas leads Cisco’s participation in many video industry and standards fora. Continue reading “New Video Services and The Impact on Networks – Part 1”



Authors

Eric Marin

CTO

Borderless Network Architecture, EMEAR

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In a previous post, I gave some (very) general requirements for how to setup / install an MPI installation.

This is post #2 in the series: now that you’ve got a shiny new computational cluster, and you’ve got one or more MPI implementations installed, I’ll talk about how to build, compile, and link applications that use MPI.

To be clear: MPI implementations are middleware — they do not do anything remarkable by themselves.  MPI implementations are generally only useful when you have an application that uses the MPI middleware to do something interesting.

Continue reading “MPI newbie: Building MPI applications”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software