Last week when I was on vacation in Istanbul, it happened to be the first week of the month-long 8^th Annual Istanbul Tulip Festival. As we were walking around the rainbow colored flower beds, I couldn’t help but notice the hordes of field-tripping school children around us, skipping along with stuffed animal backpacks in tow, smartphones in their hands.

With children growing up with devices as an integral part of their lives (Piper Jaffrey just came out with a study that says nearly half of American teenagers own an iPhone!), there’s no denying the potential of technology and education. If there’s one thing we learned from our Virtual EduForum event, it’s that schools are trying to embrace devices and keep up with technologies to harness that potential and stay ahead of the curve.

But deploying a wi-fi network at a school isn’t as simple as 1-2-3. IT visibility into the network can be especially challenging for K-12 educational environments. Some applications can disrupt mission critical applications, like mandated online testing, or negatively impact a student’s learning experience. It’s important to understand what applications are running in the network in order to selectively prioritize, deny, or manage the ones that use up more bandwidth. Although Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Quality of Service (QoS) can prioritize traffic, application visibility provides greater detail and control.

That’s why we’re continuing our K-12 Webinar Series to show you how Cisco and Meraki can help make your lives a little easier by enabling you to take control of your network with the highest visibility and performance possible.

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Another year, another CiscoLive. This was the last year in the London venue, and since it was the third time we did it, we had a chance to incorporate learning from the previous two years. As a result, I would say the network was quite a success.

The key element of the design, led by Mark McKillop, was the balance between showcasing the latest technology and maintaining the simplicity of the network. This year we had a mixed L2 + L3 core design. This design helped decrease the impact of various parts on each other. The L2 core was in place for the “special-case” requests, which a routing-based infrastructure could not help with. Read More »

Tags: cisco live, Cisco Live NOC, Cisco Live Orlando, IPv6, l2, L3, Network design

Walking around the 2013 Hannover Messe Faire can be a daunting task whether its navigating through the Hannover campus and its’  13 co-located tradeshows or figuring out which one of the broad range of special events, forums and key note speaking engagements to attend.  One thing is for certain.  The “Internet of Things”, “The Integrated Industry”  and “The Industrial Revolution 4.0″  themes all describe the evolution of connecting, embedding and extracting intelligence from previously unconnected devices. Although the industries can not come to a consensus on what to call this paradigm shift, one thing is for certain….The chosen protocol that’s empowering this evolution is ETHERNET.

The challenge lies in integrating Ethernet functionality into devices, machines or automation equipment that doesn’t always conveniently fit into a 1u, 2u, 3u, 4u… or DIN rail mounted enclosures.  Designers, integrators and machine builders need a flexible alternative to address the diverse applications, size and environmental considerations required to truly take advantage of deploying anytime, anywhere, any device connectivity to industrial automation applications.

Cisco is a pioneer in providing robust, and scalable embedded technology solutions.  Kevin Holcolmb, Cisco Technical Marketing Engineer, discusses our new ESS 2020 Embedded Switch.   Read More »

Tags: AP1552, Cisco Connected Industries, Cisco Industrial Smart Solution, collaboration, ess 2020, Ethernet/IP, Hannover Messe, IE2000, IE3000, Industrial Automation, industrial cloud, industrial embedded switch, industrial ethe, industrial netowrking, Industrial revolution 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT), IoT, mobile, ODVA, The integrated industry

We’re at the final day of Microsoft’s Management Summit 2013 (MMS 2013) here in Las Vegas. We’ve handed out ~1,500 t-shirts; performed hundreds of demos on our technologies Nexus 1000V, UCS Manager, VM-FEX, and Cisco PowerTool; evangelized our Microsoft Cloud OS solutions FlexPod and VSPEX; and generally interacted with most of the 5,000+ attendees here.

Show attendees now have a better understanding of our technologies but also and perhaps more importantly, have a better and growing understanding of the true value we bring to their Microsoft oriented data centers.

Figure 1.

 As Figure 1 shows, organizations are challenged in many ways – staff inefficiency, unscheduled downtime, OpEx and CapEx pressures, etc. We feel our Cisco Unified Data Center is a viable solution to these challenges. It delivers operational simplicity and business agility -- essential for cloud computing. The Microsoft and Cisco alliance extends the value of the Cisco Unified Data Center by integrating Windows Server, Hyper-V, Microsoft workloads such as SQL and Exchange, and finally System Center and UCS Manager management stacks into manageable and scalable solutions. As a highly secure, scalable environment for your organization the Cisco Unified Data Center automates and simplifies deployment, orchestration, and management across server, network, and cloud.

The value derived from a Cisco Unified Data Center we is that we can now help your data center scale to meet your business dynamics; simplify your I.T. management processes; lower your operating costs while delivering world class performance. In the world of Microsoft oriented data centers, we deliver this value to your organization through:

• Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Private Cloud Solutions

Move to the cloud quickly and easily with the help of Cisco Validated Designs. Part of the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track program, these preconfigured solutions consist of industry-leading technologies from Cisco, EMC (VSPEX) and NetApp (FlexPod). Reduce your risk and enjoy end-to-end architectural and deployment guidance with pretested design guides

• Cisco Validated Designs for Microsoft Workloads

To ensure Cisco customers running Microsoft software get the most from their data centers, Cisco designs, pretests, validates, and provides support for a growing list of Microsoft solutions such as Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint Server.

• Ability to Consolidate and Virtualize Microsoft Applications

Microsoft applications such as SQL Server, SharePoint Server, and Exchange Server are often prime candidates for consolidation and virtualization. Administrators can expedite and simplify virtualization deployment, management, and operations by using Cisco’s high-bandwidth, low-latency, virtualization-aware unified network fabric, Cisco UCS and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

As you can see from the various customer quotes – Xerox, Cassidy Turley, and ING Direct -- true value in terms of economies of scale, improved performance, and efficiencies are seen. To learn more about our Cisco Unified Data Center and its transformational power, please feel free to download our new brochure Microsoft on UCS: Simplify Your IT and Transform Your Business

To learn more about Cisco’s Microsoft data center capabilities, please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft

Tags: Cisco, FlexPod, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Nexus 1000v, System Center, UCS, UCS Manager, vspex

Congratulations to all OpenDaylight founding partners, contributors, users and supporters. I am convinced this ambitious endeavor will redefine the meaning of “open source = collaboration”. This is a historic event, the coming of age of networking partners driving in the open source world, companies which until now, have been primarily preoccupied with driving open standards, though in many ways, resonating with the tenet of “running code and rough consensus” almost a generation before Open Source did. Perhaps this is, back to the future.

The announcement details are on the Consortium website at the Linux Foundation, contributions come in three categories, a multi protocol Controller platform contributed by Cisco, northbound (NB) applications on top, and southbound (SB) protocol drivers to support them from below. We expect that with such diverse community from the start, we will have a very open, diverse and collaborative development that will accelerate the growth and adoption of these projects for years to come.

Having been in this project from the very beginning, I would like to tell you exactly how and why we reached the open source model that we did, my own perspective in what I think is the key to getting that balance right. But later, not today.

Today is the day to celebrate all those diverse partners that were brought together by one singular desire to grow the market for application centered networking, to grow our collective ecosystem of users, developers, partners and customers, so that we can all win. With a rise in applications NB, more SB vendors will come and with a rise in SB support, more NB applications will arrive – the promise of the infinite feedback loop. I do not believe anyone out there should look for who wins and who loses; in this endeavor, this is a positive move for the industry, this is a win-win for everyone!

I think I’m going to play that “Meet Me On The Equinox” music and get into the OpenDaylight. It’s time to move forward and I hope everyone will.

Tags: ACN, collaboration, Daylight, Equinox, Linux Foundation, open source, open source model, opendaylight, SDN controller