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Given the diversity of the attendees, I wasn’t sure what to expect at Intel® Developer Forum (IDF) having never been to one before.

Now I’m very glad to have the opportunity to discuss our updated blade and rack servers with Intel’s Xeon® E5-2600 v2 series of processors (aka Ivy Bridge v2) with potential customers, analysts, and even competitors. It was a very good experience and I hope to participate again.

I won’t reiterate the information we blogged about this week, but if you missed these IVB v2 blog posts, take a moment and catch up: Tick Tock Goes the Server Clock & New Intel Processors – Six New Cisco UCS Performance Records.

UCS Marketing at Intel IDF

Next up on the trade-show circuit for me is Oracle OpenWorld where I will be giving a theater presentation on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS): Changing the Economics of the Datacenter. I hope to see you there!



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Bill Shields

Senior Marketing Manager

Product and Solutions Marketing Team

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Hello, and welcome to my inaugural blog! I am happy to be here sharing my thoughts and experiences with you, because I have to tell you: I have the coolest job in the world.

I’ve spent my entire life in retail, starting as a part-time worker while in school and moving up through merchandising and operations to regional vice president at Shopko Stores, Inc., overseeing the work of 12,000 employees. Over more than 20 years, I fell in love with the whole process of retail. When I was invited to work in the retail technology sector, it seemed a natural extension of the work I was already doing. Relatively few tech companies build their solutions around store needs – too often, they tend to focus on technology for technology’s sake. In fact, sometimes retailers do the same thing! I saw an opportunity to impact how vendors – and retailers – think about technologies that truly add value to the business.

Today’s trend toward mobility, or BYOD, is a great example. I’m sorry if this shocks you, but mobility without a strategy has no value at all for the retailer! I have seen stores invest in Wi-Fi networks while continuing to build cell-based apps – this despite Wi-Fi’s higher speeds, more flexible capabilities, and ability to improve the shopping and selling experience. They don’t want employees surfing the Internet, so they block employee access to the network and information that could help improve sales. They understand that shoppers are “showrooming” – sharing opinions and comparison shopping online from the store – but do not leverage the same behavior to promote products and analyze customer trends.

Mobility is a vehicle for improving the business, an extension of overall strategy. (You might like to check out this Lippis Report on “Monetizing Public Wi-Fi in Business to Consumer Relationships.”) I work with companies to help determine how to use such vehicles to define the customer experience, collect and manage large masses of data, and make store operations more efficient. I also help design the Cisco solutions that solve these retail business problems.

Join me on a journey to learn how stores are approaching, managing, and dealing with today’s innovations and how they are meeting customer needs. We’ll talk about how stores are using today’s systems, the most recent trends, the latest research, and how retailers are dealing with this very rapidly changing industry. Please get back to me with your own stories and questions in the comments section.

One more word: I love retail trivia! Comment if you know the answer to this question: What retailer in the country has the highest amount of sales per square foot of its stores?



Authors

Rose Depoe

Executive Director

Consumer Products & Services

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In the past articles we’ve talked about doing distance extension for SANs, focusing first on building the physical elements that are required, before moving on to how Fibre Channel can be extended using buffer credits.

In this article we’re going to talk about how it is best to think of extending Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) SANs (finally!).

I know, I know, I start off this whole shebang by saying I’m going to talk about FCoE and distance, and it takes me this long to get to it? Sheesh! Continue reading “Storage Distance by Protocol, Part IV: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)”



Authors

J Metz

Sr. Product Manager

Data Center Group

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Today, Cisco unveiled what the Wall Street Journal is calling a new “mega chip” to keep up with growing networking communications demands.  This comes on the heels of a new Cisco Smart+Connected City Wi-Fi solution that provides a blueprint for urban environments to deploy pervasive connectivity to their citizens, government agencies and business.

These developments are part of the next wave of innovation:  the Internet of Everything.  With less than 1 percent of all devices currently connected, we now have the opportunity to IP-enable the remaining 99 percent and transform industries and lives in ways we have never before imagined.

This presents an unprecedented opportunity for American businesses and the U.S. technology industry. In fact, a new paper out today by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Michael Mandel looks at how the Internet of Everything can jumpstart the slugging economy.

Continue reading “#ExecInsights: Unlocking the Next Wave of Innovation and Job Creation”



Authors

Rob Lloyd

President, Development and Sales

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When I think about what we’ve done recently to improve our customers’ experience with Cisco, the Cisco Support Website immediately jumps to mind. The web team actively consults customers and seeks new ways to improve the web support experience. I’ve invited Glenn Schleicher, who leads the team, to discuss our software download initiative and the impact our customers are seeing.

Glenn Schleicher By Guest Contributor Glenn Schleicher

As we try to fully appreciate how online pain points affect you, stories like this one really stick with us.

The “Overnight Wiring Closet” Remedy

Imagine that you are Cisco partner “Bill,” who shared this method for getting large UCS software images:  At the end of his day Bill would leave his laptop in his last customer’s wiring closet, start the download for the image he’d need the next day, hope it wouldn’t be interrupted overnight, and then retrieve the laptop in the morning before traveling to his next customer’s network upgrade.

Surely Cisco can do better than that in distributing software for its product lines. Continue reading “The We’re Listening Blog Series: What Are We Doing About the #1 Task on Cisco.com?”



Authors

Curt Hill

Senior Vice President

Customer Assurance

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Chalkboards. Textbooks.  Stacks of papers and folders. All of these items can make anyone a little nostalgic and remind us of our time in primary and secondary school. While basic fundamentals remain the same, classrooms are evolving. The reason? The Internet.

This year’s back-to-school season has sparked many conversations around the future of the classroom. Most parents have seen the workforce and everyday life evolve as the Internet of Everything (IoE) begins to connect more people, places, data, and things. Yet questions about IoE in the classroom persist. That’s why in today’s “Ask the Futurist” post, I take a deeper look at how the IoE will impact the classroom of the future.

Today’s question comes from Rob Coote, a systems analyst for a public K-12 school district in Northern Alberta, Canada. Here’s his two-part question:

Question: “How do you envision the future of the ‘connected classroom’ and one-to-one learning in K-12 education? How do you see this impacting or changing the teacher’s role?”

Continue reading “Ask The Futurist: “How Will the Internet of Everything Impact Teachers’ Roles in the Connected Classroom?””



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The HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule, released January 2013, goes into effect this month – Sept 23, 2013. Over the last several weeks, I’ve been posting a blog series around nine HIPAA network considerations.

  1. HIPAA Audits will continue
  2. The HIPAA Audit Protocol and NIST 800-66 are your best preparation
  3. Knowledge is a powerful weapon―know where your PHI is
  4. Ignorance is not bliss
  5. Risk Assessment drives your baseline
  6. Risk Management is continuous
  7. Security best practices are essential
  8. Breach discovery times: know your discovery tolerance
  9. Your business associate(s)must be tracked

This blog focuses on #6 – Risk Management is Continuous.

You can look at the Risk Management implementation specification as the actions taken in response to the Risk Assessment.  The HIPAA Security Rule defines Risk management (Required):  “Implement security measures sufficient to reduce risks and vulnerabilities to a reasonable and appropriate level to comply with [§ 164.306(a)]”

(1) Ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all electronic protected health information the covered entity creates, receives, maintains, or transmits.

(2) Protect against any reasonably anticipated threats or hazards to the security or integrity of such information.

(3) Protect against any reasonably anticipated uses or disclosures of such information

One common mistake companies make in compliance programs is taking the approach that once the work is done, the network doesn’t have to be looked at again for compliance.  If they put the security programs, processes, and technologies in place, they don’t have to spend time on compliance until next year (or the year after that, or even longer).

This makes compliance a onetime effort that is then ignored.  Worse, securing PHI often follows the same path, making it easy to hack and steal, causing a lot of problems for everyone involved.  Risk management―reducing risk―needs to be a continuous activity.   Through your risk assessment, you’ll know where your PHI is, what your highest risk factors are, and where to implement more continuous risk management tools in the network.

Continuous risk management does not mean tracking every single event on every single device throughout the network.  It may mean turning on automatic alerts on critical devices, setting traffic thresholds in network areas where PHI resides, logging anomalous events in those critical areas, and using network management tools to make sense of all this information the network devices are collecting.

Risk management is about a lot more than achieving HIPAA compliance, reducing risk to PHI and helping to prevent theft of PHI is of critical value.

Recommendation: Understand where you should implement continuous risk management, and what logging, alert, detection, and management tools you already have that can help with risk management.

To learn more about Cisco® compliance solutions and HIPAA services, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/compliance



Authors

Terri Quinn

Security Solutions Manager

Security Technology Group

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Over the last 30 years the Internet has transformed multiple times. Most of us take it for granted these days. We expect to watch videos on Netflix, run our meetings over WebEx, talk to our friends across the globe on Skype, and have access whether we’re at work, home, or on the go. But we forget that the Internet wasn’t originally built for this – it’s been barely 20 years since email, the World Wide Web, and always-on network access have become realities. The changes have occurred at a dizzying pace.

In the beginning the only way to handle the work of the Internet – routing and forwarding packets – was by using general-purpose computer chips. This didn’t last long as the explosive growth in network bandwidth drove Cisco and other infrastructure providers to use more customized silicon. Indeed, Cisco’s market success was driven in large part by our ability to offer industry-leading solutions with the best combination of price, performance, and capabilities. This in turn was fueled by Cisco’s use of internally developed network silicon using advanced ASIC development models ahead of competitors who continued to rely on general purpose CPUs or FPGAs to power their products.

Now the Internet is on Continue reading “How the World’s Most Advanced Network Processor is Making the Internet of Everything Possible”



Authors

Nikhil Jayaram

No Longer with Cisco

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When we examine the average wireless client on a network today, we see a few options. There is the smartphone, the tablet, or the laptop. Even the Apple TV and Roku are often based off of similar technology and chipsets. All of these devices connect to a wide range of services, often consuming large amounts of bandwidth: we stream music while we browse; we video chat with friends, family, and coworkers across the globe; catch up on our favorite shows or sports teams. Occasionally, we do all of these things at the same time.

Our current wireless networks are built to handle this type of traffic. With 802.11AC, it is clear that we will be ready for anything that our standard client will encounter in the near future.  But what happens when the standard client model is broken?  The increasing shift to an Internet of Everything (IoE) forces us to face this question about the future of wireless clients.

There are lots IoE devices already on the market, and the next couple of years will see developments not that dissimilar from those during the “internet revolution” of the late 90’s. Finally, the average user will have the access and the ability to afford the smart homes we have been dreaming of for the past thirty-plus years. Continue reading “IoE: Dead or Alive on Wireless”



Authors

Jonathan Davis

Network Engineer