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Over the last 15 months Cisco has revolutionized how organizations provide reliable, secure access to end-users and devices that connect via wireless, wired or VPN networks. This new approach to unified access delivers significant operational improvements by delivering One Policy, One Management, and One Network. However, operational improvements are only half of the story. As a key solution within the Cisco ONE Enterprises Network Architecture, Cisco Unified Access allows IT to shift from merely managing the network to driving business change by delivering new connected experiences.

Business Innovation Starts with Mobility

IT is looking beyond just securely onboarding mobile devices to now scaling the access across devices. The goal is to provide the best possible user experience for rich media applications while managing the applications and content on these devices.  Mobile device use continues to grow and the bandwidth required by the applications on those devices is likewise increasing. Higher mobile density, and the need for an infrastructure that can handle it,  is becoming a necessity: Continue reading “Cisco Expands the Reach and Power of Unified Access to Drive Business Innovation”



Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility

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Have you heard? Many organizations are now realizing that they can leverage location-based services to provide personalized mobile experiences and customer analytics. It pays to stay connected to your consumers and enhancing the mobile experience. Today at Interop New York, we unveiled a number of new product and solution innovations built to expand on and extend the power of Cisco Unified Access to drive these new connected mobile experiences.

Nearly one year into announcing our Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution, and with today’s announcement, there’s even more. We’re kicking off a deep dive blog series to give you an in depth look at the new enhancements, but for now here’s a taste of what’s new:

CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi 

CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi allows retailers, hoteliers, restaurants, and more to engage and analyze customers and guests using the Cisco and Facebook Wi-Fi platforms. It enables guests to easily connect to the Wi-Fi network using their Facebook credentials and “check-in” to the venue’s Facebook profile. The check ins give venues additional marketing and branding opportunities through broadcasting through guest news feeds, as well as valuable demographic information. See how a conference center, Evergreen Brickworks, is using the solution:

CMX Analytics

Enhanced onsite analytics have a revamped UI to show you how, where, and when customers and visitors are moving throughout a venue. Continue reading “Leveraging Location: Cisco Sets the Curve with Facebook and Other Partners”



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Continuing the blog series (Part-I) on the production deployment designs and the real-world benefits of Multi-Hop FCoE infrastructure, this blog features University of Siegen, based in Germany.

siegenBefore delving into the details, a bit of background – The University of Siegen is a modern educational institution with a strong international profile. Its 17,500 students and 1700 staff are based in eight locations around the town of Siegen in Germany, although more than 11 percent of students come from other countries. The BYOD, e-learning initiatives and other research applications were putting the university’s IT environment under pressure. So, the University was looking to optimize IT services for educational and operational efficiency and as well to introduce the latest technology for future-proofing their Data Center. 

Using the Cisco “wire-once, enable anywhere” design philosophy, the University connected the old storage environment, which is based on Fibre Channel, with the new FCoE domain. Cisco UCS server is connected to the Director-Class Cisco Nexus 7000 platform, which in turn is connected via Multi-hop FCoE to Cisco MDS 9000 SAN Director. The newer FCoE Storage array is connected directly to Nexus 7000 for the End-to-End FCoE connectivity.

Siegen-Dep

The benefits to using Cisco Unified Fabric infrastructure were quite significant  Continue reading “Who’s deploying Multi-Hop FCoE? – Part II”



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I am often asked by customers why UCS has been so successful in such a short amount of time. My response is always the same in that it comes down to two things – 1) Cisco and our partners’ ability to understand and execute against customer needs and 2) A fundamental difference in the underlying architecture.

You may know that Cisco invented UCS service profiles and built the entire system around the notion of hardware state abstraction. Cisco’s approach has been so successful because every element of the system was designed from the beginning to have its configuration set through software, without any licensing requirements. Whether customers are running bare-metal, virtualized, or any combination therein, Cisco UCS service profiles have revolutionized computing and have challenged competitors to try and replicate the simplicity and increased productivity that UCS Manager policies and templates provide. It’s no secret that Cisco UCS Manager has revolutionized the way customers deploy and manage servers, but here are a few things about UCS Manager that you may not be aware of.

Did you know that Cisco UCS Manager is embedded software running within the Fabric Interconnects in a highly available clustered configuration? This is an important distinction from traditional architectures as Cisco UCS Manager is a fully redundant management engine right out of the box the moment the system receives power, without special clustering software or additional licensing fees. Continue reading “The One and Only Cisco UCS Manager”



Authors

Kevin Egan

Director, Compute Systems Group

Cisco’s Data Center Business Group

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After delivering several presentations at Cisco Live and Cisco Connect this year, I received a few questions regarding DNS Response Policy Zones (RPZ) and how can they be used to block DNS resolution to known malicious hosts and sites. I decided to write this short post to explain what it is and provide several pointers.

DNS RPZ is a technology developed by ISC available since Bind version 9.8. Network administrators can use DNS RPZ to essentially stop malware-infected hosts from reaching their command and control (C&C) servers by blocking DNS resolution to known malicious hosts and sites. This effectively turns a recursive DNS server into a DNS firewall. In fact, many people refer to DNS RPZ as the “DNS Firewall.” Various ISPs are testing and implementing this to provide additional protection to their customers.

Note: DNS RPZ will block DNS resolution, machines connecting to the C&C via IP address will not be blocked.

The following figure provides an overview of how DNS RPZ works.

RPZ-overview1

Continue reading “Using DNS RPZ to Block Malicious DNS Requests”



Authors

Omar Santos

Distinguished Engineer

Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) Security Research and Operations

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By Shailesh Shukla, VP & GM, SWAG Global, CiscoShailesh Shukla

Overview
The surging demand for data, and the continued growth of Smartphones consumption forces mobile service providers expand their network in order to provide Quality of Experience and Quality of service to their customers. As a result their network becomes more complex and difficult to manage. Leading Lights Awards has recognized the Cisco Quantum SON Suite as the leading solution and “Best Mobile Product” for 2013, to automatically manage the already complex network from a single point, without extra equipment and guaranting KPI’s?

What is the Cisco Quantum SON? Continue reading “Cisco Quantum SON Suite Wins Best Mobile Product at Leading Lights Award”



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It’s the Season 3 Grand Finale of Engineers Unplugged! Today’s guests, Joe Onisick and Nils Swart, take on Application Affinity: how to bridge the network world and the application world. Is it possible to remove the complexity to speed adoption?  Watch and see:

Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:

  1. Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
  2. Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
  3. Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
  4. Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
  5. Practice drawing unicorns

What’s your view–horse or unicorn? Join the conversation on Twitter with #EngineersUnplugged. Look for the Season 4 premiere, coming your way soon!



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You must be thinking I am joking, when I say that there is an affinity between me and San Francisco Moscone center. Yes, August end, I was there for VMworld 2013 and September end I was back there again for Oracle Open world (OOW 2013). But there is more to my experiences at OOW this year, than this coincidence of venue.

There are two key takeaways for me from OOW. First, the news of the world record established by Cisco UCS on Oracle E-Business Suite Applications R12 benchmark. EMC CEO Joe Tucci highlighted this in his keynote as well at OOW.  Read the detailed solutions brief posted by Girish Kulkarni.

Second, Cisco UCS is the only Oracle partner platform tested and certified with Oracle NoSQLDB. Read BigData solutions brief posted in www.cisco.com/go/bigdata and Charles Lamb’s blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/charlesLamb/entry/cisco_and_oracle_nosql_database

At OOW, I had a busy week doing demos of Oracle on UCS, and enjoyed quality face time with customers and partners sharing their UCS experiences with me. Along these lines, I was able to grab some time with Jim McHugh (our VP of marketing for UCS) to specifically discuss Cisco UCS advantages for Oracle. Watch the Video here

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Related Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSi2xd–JI4

www.cisco.com/go/ucs

www.cisco.com/go/oracle

www.cisco.com/go/bigdata



Authors

Ravi Balakrishnan

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Datacenter Solutions

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For that last few years, Cisco has been watching the impact of the Internet on transforming the retail industry. As more people, processes and things are connecting to the Internet, retailers can capture more data to better predict when and where consumers will want to buy and capture more revenues.

Today, Cisco released Internet of Everything research that equates to $81 billion globally in 2013. But this represents only 45% of the opportunity that could be gained by the Internet of Everything. Retailers could have realized an additional $99 billion this year if they were more connected across their operations.  The good news is that retail IT executives are confident that can capture this value.  On average, retail IT executives rated their ability to capture Internet of Everything at 7.2, on a scale of 1 to 10.

Continue reading “New Study Shows Value of Internet on Retail”



Authors

Jon Stine

Director

Retail Consumer Products-Transportation-Hospitality in IBSG