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Back to school madness is in full swing in our house. That means early alarms going off, rushing around in the morning and cranky kids. However, there is something new this year at least in our household. There aren’t books all over the dining room table like last year. That’s because our son’s High School is now putting everything on iPads. That’s right all books, all notes and all assignments are all on one device.

Long gone are the days of heavy backpacks or lockers packed full of books. No more highlighters to mark books or making book covers to make sure the books last longer. The school has a one-iPad-per-student model and believes it will expand student access to engaging tools and resources.

Engaging is the word I would like to focus on here. One of my son’s teachers goes as far as posting assignments and directions on her own YouTube channel. What better way to connect with kids than to do it on a medium they love to use. So I watched one of the sessions and it was great. Long, yes, but still good and gave students step-by-step instructions.

Simultaneously as this is happening at home, at work our team has just launched a new monthly magazine. Our topic this month is education. The magazine has tons of content about how technology is changing the way we learn. One of the stories even focuses on the one laptop per child program and our contributing writer talks to Nicholas Negroponte who founded the program.

That said I now know some people don’t agree with the one-iPad-per-student model, but this is a digital world we are living in now. What better way to have our kids adapt than by having them do all of their work on one device and also engage with their instructors online during the process. I have to admit, sometimes it does freak me out that my son barely knows how to write in cursive, but he can probably type faster and find something online way quicker than I can. The best part is I know he is getting a good education and learning about the importance of this increasingly digital world at the same time.

 



Authors

Joie Healy

Director

Corporate Communications

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Hey Bro, Do you even LISP?

So in the last article, we discussed a bit of why a solution like LISP ( Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol) is required. To summarize, there aren’t enough IPv4 addresses to go around and there are too many IPv6 addresses to let them ‘roam’ using traditional routing methods. Available in IOS (15.1X+) and NX-OS with standards currently being developed within the IETF LISP Working Group, LISP provides a promising solution to mapping IP nodes to locations on the Internet.

zazzle
Zazzle

If you read the last article, by now some of you are saying, “John, the devices that roam, such as mobile phones, can simply acquire new addresses on the most local network. Why do we need LISP?” It is true this is how we do it now, and it works reasonably well for most users and applications. While it would be nice to seamlessly stream as we move from one network to another, that is more of a luxury feature than a necessity.

The Case for LISP

Let’s forget about mobile devices for just a moment and consider virtual machines and cloud computing. Virtual machines (VM) themselves are increasingly mobile. If I want to do maintenance on some bare metal, I can migrate that VM to another node but if my IP address is going to change, this adds a series of complications in updating services and applications such as DNS (Domain Name Service), to point at the correct address. These name to address mappings can be cached causing significant delays between a desired move and an actualized result when the cache finally expires. Continue reading “Solving the Network Location Problem with LISP Part 2”



Authors

John Spade

Technology Architect

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This is the fourth post in a blog series featuring Vine-format videos focusing on the “Six Essential Steps for Unleashing the Power of Enterprise Mobility”. The first blog post discussing how to build a mobile structure can be found here. The second blog post highlighting the benefits going virtual can be found here. The third blog post focused on preparing enterprises for the division of devices can be found here.  

For today’s app-centric mobile workforce, it’s no longer enough to provide basic security features for devices. Gone are the days where security for mobility is “all or nothing” where virtual private networks (VPNs) gave you access to all corporate network resources, or you had very limited email and calendaring access.

Today, enterprises are managing public and private mobile applications that require a shift in security practices and a new application strategy. Here’s a short checklist to guide enterprises as they create app checkpoints to meet new security demands:

Step 4
To watch the video, see: http://youtu.be/dpQ5_n6FoX4

1. Look for a rapid, reliable, and secure vetting process for applications. 

IT security teams are usually directed toward securing the network and the devices connected to it, versus securing the applications that run on those devices. Many organizations lack the resources to evaluate an application’s ability to handle sensitive information throughout its lifecycle.

Companies rarely have the resources to monitor sites that could breed malware, nor do they have the ability to maintain heuristic algorithms to identify such sites prior to infection. And those that decide to secure mobile apps themselves might end up having to prioritize remediations, leaving them vulnerable. Continue reading “The Fourth Step to Enterprise Mobility: Create an App Checkpoint”



Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility

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Cisco and EMC continue to partner closely to speed our customers journey to the cloud via our “three paths to the cloud’ strategy. The strategy enables customers to implement custom-design infrastructures with best-of-breed products, validated reference architectures via Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX, and pre-integrated converged infrastructure from VCE.

In the last year, Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX have generated significant momentum with customers and partners.  In this short period of time we have:

  • Signed up more than 850 channel partners
  • Nearly 1,000 VSPEX customers around the world
  • Published 9 CVD’s focused on virtualization and desktop virtualization
  • 60% y/y growth in viewership on our VSPEX CVD pages

Cisco and EMC will continue collaborating on VSPEX to expand the solution portfolio and accelerate growth. As a preview of future VSPEX CVDs, two new solution briefs have just been released. These solution briefs enable customers to choose their desired hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2 or VMware VSphere 5.1, and get a validated configuration for up to 1000 virtual machines based upon Cisco UCS servers and networking with next-generation EMC VNX Series storage. The next-generation EMC VNX Series storage will complement VSPEX solutions by enhancing virtual application performance through multicore optimization software taking advantage of the latest multicore CPUs.

Building your own infrastructure solutions can not only take time and resources but also can introduce additional risk and complexity. This is exactly the problem that Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX solves by offering presized and validated solutions that give customers confidence that they are deploying the right balance of computing, networking, and storage resources.

Congratulations to the Cisco and EMC teams for their momentum with Cisco Solutions for EMC VSPEX and thank you for making it easy for organizations to quickly deploy a powerful, secure virtualized environment without the expense or risk entailed in designing and building a custom solution.

To learn more about Cisco’s solutions for EMC VSPEX please visit www.cisco.com/go/vspex.



Authors

Jim McHugh

Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Unified Computing Systems

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The increase in enterprise data storage needs coupled with longer data retention periods (mandated by legislation and compliance regulations) is leading to large growth in storage infrastructure: more backup, complex archive and disaster recovery, and increased requirements for resources, such as space, power, cooling, storage, and personnel. While businesses are trying to reduce their CapEx and OpEx, they are challenged to lower their storage infrastructure investments.  In order to be more responsive in a highly competitive marketplace, organizations are transforming to support the 21st century needs, by being more agile and efficient in delivering centralized applications and services to a geographically distributed customer base. To accomplish these goals, organizations are consolidating data centers, adding virtualization technologies, and leveraging cloud architectures. These initiatives, along with others, are imposing significant strain on storage networks

 Now the question is how do you consolidate and virtualize Storage efficiently and support DC transformation? Is it by enabling FC or FCoE or iSCSI or NAS ?

May be, the answer is — “Multi-protocol Storage”… To provide highest reliability, scalability, and performance, organizations have traditionally deployed Fibre Channel storage networks and some will continue to do so.   FC is still the preferred choice for enterprise (large and small) and market transition from 4/8 G to 16 G is the best proof that FC market is strong and growing. While FC is growing,  Ethernet based Storage solutions ( i.e.FCOE, iSCSI etc) is also gaining mindshare and some of our progressive customers use end to end FCOE  and  other Ethernet based Storage protocols to reap  benefit of convergence.  Cisco solution enables true convergence by combining the power of Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC) technology.

 If you like to learn how to design your converged storage networks, please attend the: Design Zone Webinar Series: Next topic – Network Convergence in a Unified Data CenterRegister: Sep 10 2013  8:00 AM  PST. This session will help you understand how FCoE technology can be deployed incrementally in the evolving converged data center designs. Learn how to design and deploy real-world converged storage networks with a number of real customer examples

Sep 10th 8:00 AM PST
Design Zone Webinar

Continue reading “Data Center Transformation: Impact on Storage Networks”



Authors

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

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Hospitality 3The hotel industry has traditionally managed IT applications and network infrastructure locally on property, which led to higher costs associated with having local resources on premises.  But now, many hotels have realized a need for greater operational efficiency and an ability to meet guests’ Wi-Fi needs. A virtual server seems to be the solution.

According to Gartner Inc., approximately 60 percent of servers will be virtualized by 2014, up from 12 percent in 2008.  Clearly, we are starting to see large businesses across multiple industries realize the benefits of virtualizing their server workload.  For example, one benefit is that IT executives are able to cut down the costs of storing data through physical hardware, which is both a costly and inefficient method. Without physical hardware, an on-site IT staff is no longer necessary which also reduces operational costs. Additionally, offloading information to the cloud helps free up bandwidth for guests and customers alike to utilize – a benefit very helpful to hoteliers that put the guest experience first. Continue reading “Clouds are Rolling into the Hotel Industry”



Authors

William Gustafson

Vertical Solutions Architect

Cisco Systems

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In his blog last week, Daryl Coon announced how there’s going to be a webinar this Thursday talking about Cisco’s leading One Policy solution driver, the Identity Services Engine (ISE) and its newest enhancements—now available with its 1.2 release.

During this free event, you will learn about the new features that provide increased scalability, reliability, and ease-of-use for guest access and BYOD on-boarding. You will hear from customers who have already deployed the 1.2 release. And we will discuss how the enhancements provide significantly greater capabilities than solutions available from competing vendors.Whether you need to support BYOD work practices, or provide more secure access to your data center resources, the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) can help. With this all-in-one enterprise policy control platform, you can reliably enforce compliance, enhance infrastructure security, and simplify service operations.

Read more at http://blogs.cisco.com/borderless/ciscos-policy-enforcement-solution-delivers/

Already sold? Join us for the free webinar, Thursday Sept 5 at 10am PST to learn more.



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As Cisco’s executive sponsor for Brazil, I had the honor and privilege to launch our new Rio de Janeiro Center of Innovation on August 22.

IMG_8644I am very excited about the opportunities the Rio Center of Innovation can provide to enable growth – this venture is just one of many investments we are making to develop applications and solutions to foster what we call the Internet of Everything – expected to generate $613B in global profits in 2013, and $14.4 trillion of potential economic “value at stake” over the next decade. The facility will support local companies to develop applications and solutions intended to connect the 99 percent of things that still remain unconnected in the world today.

The Rio Center of Innovation will allow local companies to take advantage of some of the foundational technologies Cisco provides. We will join forces with our partners to create software, solutions and innovation for Brazil. Initially, we will support various sectors, such as: oil and gas; sports and entertainment; healthcare; education; public safety and security; and Smart grid.

Continue reading “#ExecInsights:Brazil Spotlights Innovation and the Internet of Everything”



Authors

Rob Lloyd

President, Development and Sales

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Getting eyes on your content can be rough. Social media giants like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn offer an overwhelming number of content sharing solutions to their users. Whether you’re just dipping your toes into social media, or have been tweeting, blogging, and networking for years, these tips can help you reach out to your target audience more easily.

GuyLookingAtPhone

Facebook

Let’s start with Facebook! Facebook’s page feature enables businesses to share pictures, videos, and news with people who have “liked” their page. The page feature allows the administrator of the page to view analytics such as the demographic, weekly views, and audience interaction. Have you had any success in the past using Facebook’s analytics? I’m interested to gather more examples!

One example I really like is from Threadless.  The company uses their page to promote new products, inform customers about promotions, and respond to customer feedback. Here is an example of Facebook insights:

Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights

Facebook also offers groups” for sharing content and collaborating. Members of a group can share content to the group wall so every member can see it. You can also invite whole groups to events, and share documents. When you update a document, Facebook gives you the option to record what you have changed in the update. Group administrators may use privacy settings to restrict access to viewing or posting to a given group. Also, a secret group can’t be searched for and members must request permission to join.

Ways to Leverage a Group

  • Use as a company intranet.
  • Plan group events.
  • Communicate and share content with customers.

Here’s an example of leveraging a group:

FacebookGroups

Facebook Groups

Twitter 

Now let’s move onto Twitter. This channel is often used for customer support, crowdsourcing, creating 2-way dialogues, building brand awareness, or public relations. To illustrate one of these communication types, let’s walk through this Nike example. Nike made a separate twitter account for customer service; customers tweet to this handle and Nike answers their questions. Making a twitter handle devoted to customer service provides a simple and effective solution for customer service.

Companies also leverage Twitter for B2B transactions on an ongoing basis. It’s really one of the best ways to use Twitter for business! A study showed that 11% of Twitter users who saw a tweet from a B2B tech brand visited their site and filled out a sign up form. Aurora Health Care in Milwaukee live tweeted pictures of a bi-lateral knee replacement to show off their new orthopedics technology. Aurora Health Care saw a 15% conversion from leads to sales after live tweeting the surgery.

And Twitter’s “list” feature allows a user to keep and share a set of other users and their tweets. Many businesses find that this allows them to track potential customers and clients for B2B transactions. For this type of business, the list feature has many advantages. Here’s a snapshot of a list:

TwitterLists

Twitter List

Twitter List B2B Advantages

  • View specifics for your industry by putting followers in a list.
  • Target groups of industry experts with questions by tweeting at a list.
  • People that are interested in you can subscribe to your list and increase your audience.

LinkedIn

Another great social media outlet for sharing content is LinkedIn. This channel allows you to share your insights with other members within your network, throughout LinkedIn, or even with select members.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for networking and interacting with members of the site. With a few simple clicks you can communicate with business and people from all over the world. This makes a great B2B business tool. By using the LinkedIn “groups” feature you can create your own groups or join other groups and collaborate. My favorite example of this is when a lawyer created a group on employment law issues for HR directors and managers. One year later the group had more then 1,000 members! Once the group was establish the law firm hosted two HR question times in their offices. The majority of attendees were not clients. The firm used this opportunity to build relationships with the attendees and eventually turn them into clients. 

LinkedIn offers targeted status updates for business pages. You can choose to share a status update with the public, employee’s only, specific employees, or by industry, seniority, and geography. Targeting specific audiences can really help the way in which you share content.

Benefits of Sharing Content With Specific Audiences 

  • Avoiding cluttering the feeds of uninterested users.
  • Targeting people who are knowledgeable about the content.
  • Testing content with friends and followers before releasing it to the public.

Choosing the right media and medium is critical. Sharing the right content with the right users can make your social media efforts much more effective. If you have a great example of content sharing via social media, let us know in the comments and share!

 

 

 



Authors

Jay Hartford

IT Analyst