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Yesterday, CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) released its assessment of how companies in the S&P 500 did on CDP’s 2013 carbon investor questionnaire. About a week ago, CDP released a similar assessment for the Global 500, the 500 largest companies by market capitalization on the FTSE Global Equity Index. PricewaterhouseCoopers performed both assessments for CDP using information submitted earlier this year by the responding companies.

SP500 CDP report coverAlong with six other companies, Cisco tied for the top spot on the Global 500 with a disclosure score of 100 and an “A” performance rating. We were alone in first place in the IT sector. We were also at the top of the S&P 500 assessment (tied with BNY Mellon and Entergy). “Top” is certainly a great place to be, but I think we take more pride in being on the Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index (CDLI) for six years in a row. For a long-term problem like climate change, consistently high rankings over an extended period are strong evidence of a company’s commitment to improving greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disclosure and performance.

Continue reading “Cisco Tops CDP Global and U.S. Carbon Rankings”



Authors

Darrel Stickler

Sustainable Business Practices

Corporate Affairs

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Last week I had the rare pleasure of being able to attend a storage conference (rare in the sense that I usually am one of the speakers, rather than one of the attendees). It was SNIA’s Storage Developer’s Conference, and like most events there were both things that were interesting and worthwhile, and things that left something to be desired.

ConfusionThe lasting impression that I walked away with, however, was something that went beyond any one particular conversation, presentation, or technology. Indeed, the thoughts that have been rattling around in my brain for the past week made me realize that, if we (those of us in the industry) aren’t careful, the future looks extremely convoluted and confusing. At worst we may actually wind up mismatching solutions to problems, taking giant steps backwards, locking us into a perpetual game of ‘catch-up’ as we struggle to accomplish what we can do today using traditional storage methodology and equipment Continue reading “Thoughts and Observations: Software Defined Storage”



Authors

J Metz

Sr. Product Manager

Data Center Group

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This blog was originally posted on the Huffington Post.

Many of the problems we face today are so large and widespread, no one organization or agency can solve them alone. Yet, individuals and local organizations work toward solutions every day. At Cisco, we believe that social entrepreneurs with common goals can work better when they work together.

We took our research into what makes collaboration work in a global enterprise and applied it to cross-organizational collaboration between corporations and academic and non-governmental organizations, working for a social benefit. Getting busy people connected and engaged takes a holistic look at culture and business process as well as an effective collaborative technology platform.

A Collaborative Effort by Hospitals Worldwide to Go Green

About a year ago, we began working with Health Care Without Harm, a global network of hospitals and health systems committed to reducing their environmental footprint and promoting environmental health worldwide. We wanted to explore how our technology platform could connect people and create meaningful collaboration around a global challenge with local impact.

Continue reading “5 Keys To Creating A Lasting Impact Through Collaboration”



Authors

Harbrinder Kang

VP

Corporate Affairs

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Seventy-five million youth around the world are unemployed, yet in Brazil, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, more than half of all employers are unable to find enough skilled entry-level workers.  How do we help youth around the world get the opportunities to build a bright future for themselves and become forces for positive change? This is the topic that Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers will be discussing at the 2013 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting this week in New York. He is speaking Wednesday morning, September 25, in a breakout session entitled CGI Conversations hosted by CNN’s Piers Morgan, along with Chelsea Clinton; Muhtar Kent, the Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company; and Peggy Mativo, Founder and Executive Director of PACEmaker International. The panel discussion will be recorded for broadcast on CNN.

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Continue reading “Mobilizing for Impact with the Clinton Global Initiative”



Authors

Jennifer Barr

Social Media Manager, Online Brand

Cisco Talent Acquisition

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Often times, one of your best bets to expand business is to look at your own existing customers and their current investments. Taking the time to analyze how many of your customers are actively using Cisco Collaboration products is the first step. Are your customers fully trained? Are all of the applications activated and being used on a regular basis across multiple devices? Going beyond your IT relationships and talking to line-of-business executives about how to use collaboration tools in their daily work lives will expand their use cases, drive greater adoption and unlock their collaboration potential. What it means for you is greater long-term sales, deeper customer relationships and increased business relevance.

Get Your Customers Current
By moving your customers to the latest version of Cisco Unified Communications Manager, you can help them take advantage of more powerful collaboration capabilities such as native connectivity TelePresence and mobile video on any device (including the new Jabber for Android), and also achieve a lower cost of management. The Cisco Drive to 9 initiative makes upgrading your customers much easier for you. We’ve created a simpler, streamlined licensing and ordering process for upgrades – that leads to cost and time savings for you. We also have a new tablet-based tool – CUCM Upgrade Central – that lets you analyze your customer’s readiness, determine a recommended path, and estimate the potential savings.

Accelerate Activation for Faster Time to Value Continue reading “Help Customers Unlock their Collaboration Potential”



Authors

Richard McLeod

No Longer with Cisco

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While FCoE technology has been standardized for quite some time now, most FCoE deployments have been upto the access layer of the network.  Multi-hop FCoE deployments are gaining traction increasingly. Many a times, I get asked to share the production deployment designs and the real-world benefits of Multi-Hop FCoE infrastructure. So, in this series of blogs, I plan to share the same. In this blog, the spotlight is on a division of the world’s largest aerospace company, Boeing Defense, Space, and Security (BDS).

Boeing-LogoBDS provides end-to-end services for large-scale systems and supports a diverse range of customers, including the U.S. Army, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). When the global recession hit the aerospace industry in 2010, BDS came under extreme pressure to cut costs. Dual network topologies, both FC and IP, were adding complexity to the network. BDS needed to reduce the TCO and at the same time increase the network agility, improve scalability and maintain highest availability possible.

As a result, the company decided to adopt FCoE to consolidate its IP and SAN data traffic on a single network. Since 2010, BDS has extended its use of FCoE and is now 100 percent Multi-hop FCoE. BDS deployed End-to-End FCoE architecture with Nexus 5000 at the access layer, the Director-class Nexus 7000 at the Core, connected to the FCoE Storage Arrays.

Boeing-Deployment

For BDS, the shift to the new Cisco Unified Fabric infrastructure and leveraging FCoE has delivered unparalleled value to the organization.  Continue reading “Who’s deploying Multi-Hop FCoE? – Part I”



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Cisco’s Advanced Services has been performing penetration tests for our customers since the acquisition of the Wheel Group in 1998. We call them Security Posture Assessments, or SPA for short, and I’ve been pen testing for just about as long. I’ll let you in on a little secret about penetration testing: it gets messy!

During our typical assessments we may analyze anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 hosts for vulnerabilities, perform various exploitation methods such as account enumeration and password attempts, buffer/stack overflows, administrative bypasses, and others. We then have to collect and document our results within the one or two weeks we are on site and prepare a report.

How can anyone keep track of all this data, let alone work together as a team? Are you sure you really found the holy grail of customer data and adequately documented it? What if you’re writing the report but you weren’t the one who did the exploit? Continue reading “Introducing Kvasir”



Authors

Kurt Grutzmacher

Solutions Architect, Security Practice

Advanced Services

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Gartner has released their 2013 Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant.  For the 2nd time in a row, Cisco is recognized as a leader in this highly anticipated publication.

Without further ado, here is the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure (Authors: Tim Zimmerman and Mark Fabbi; Published 3rd September 2013).
Continue reading “Cisco Positioned as A Leader in the Gartner Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant – For a 2nd Time in a …”



Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility

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At some point, every data center has to migrate a complete server identity between two servers.  This could be driven by maintenance needs, server upgrades or DR/HA and SLA requirements.  For DR/HA, Business Continuity requirements mandate that this be done as quickly as possible, which means automation is critical to drive time to productivity restoration.  True automation equals fewer steps and faster implementation, with the smallest possibility for error.  This is more than just setting up a similar server with the same BIOS and firmware and then doing a lot of manual work requiring multiple administrative domains – compute, network and storage.   I’m talking about QoS, vNIC / vHBA setting, storage access and ownership transfers, etc., the whole enchilada, all delivered in an automated repeatable process by design not by accident.

Not surprisingly, Cisco UCS with UCS Manager does the job – fast, complete and in full.  What may be surprising is that Cisco UCS Manager enables you to do this transfer not just from blade server to blade server, you can also do it from blade server to rack serverUCS Manager comes with and is embedded on the UCS Fabric Interconnects.  I want to emphasize that there is no additional charge for UCS Manager, which is an important consideratin when you look at other companies’ multiple toolsets, agents and databases, most of which carry an additional cost, and which are required to equal UCS Manager functionality.  UCS Manager architecture does not require a separate management server which other designs typically require.

The very best part of the entire activity is that the full migration of the server identity (enabled by Cisco SingleConnect technology) takes just 6 initial steps with UCS Manager; the rest is all about how we deliver on the promise of automation.  UCS Manager lets you use and specify 127+ different server identity parameters including:

48 BIOS Settings

Host BIOS Firmware

Hdwr NIC Teaming (fabric failover)

FC Adapter & Storage Controller Firmware

BIOS & Disk Scrub Actions

IPMI Settings

Dynamic vNICs (VM FEX)

QoS Settings

NIC and HBA Adapter Settings

vHBA WWPN & WWNN Assignment

HBA FC SAN Membership,

NIC Receive Rate & NIC MTU size

FC & iSCSI Boot Parameters

Server UUID

PCIe Bus Scan Order and PCIe Device Slot Placement

And Much Much More…….

The above all sounds good.  Now we need to see ‘proof of delivery’.  Below are the links to a white paper by Principled Technologies that are the real point of this blog – complete (not partial) migration of a server identity from a blade server to a rack server.

Blade to rack migration Paper

The real fun is to watch the accompanying video below.  See for yourself how much time it takes in an apples to apples server identity migration from a blade to a rack server.  Once you take a look at the video (the paper on the right has the full details of the testing), you will find taking a UCS Test Drive worthwhile.

       https://youtu.be/mN-aLzGCpEI

 The ability of Cisco UCS server to manage both blade and rack servers with a single tool is  UCS Manager. Cisco took a unique approach to computing and focused on the common point of interaction, the fabric. Servers don’t operate in isolation. They are part of a total environment that at the minimum encompasses servers, networking, management and storage – a Fabric Based Infrastructure .  Cisco’s comprehensive and efficient architecture is the key to why customers worldwide are rapidly adopting UCS.

For information on how UCS and UCS Manager integrate with a wide variety of our leading management partners follow this link UCS Manager Ecosystem Partners, and for interoperability with other major systems management tools please see the UCS Interoperability page.