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Over the last several months, I’ve been pleased to invite Mark Townsley, Cisco Fellow and recognized expert on Internet Protocol (IP), to discuss IPv6 as a key enabler of the Internet of Everything (IoE). In his series of guest blogs, Mark has explained the basics of IPv6 and why it is important (“Demystifying IPv6”), and discussed some of the technical challenges of moving to this latest version of IP (“Moving to IPv6: Rebuilding the Heart of the Internet Without Missing a Beat”). In this installment, Mark takes a look into the future at some of the things IPv6 will make possible. I’m particularly excited about this, because the unlimited addressing scheme of IPv6 is what will enable the exponential growth of connections among people, process, data, and things that will drive $14.4 trillion in IoE private-sector value over the next decade, and dramatically impact our daily lives. This is Mark’s third and final blog on IPv6.

 

townsleyIn my last blog, I explored various ways that IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist on the same network —each vital during the global IPv6 transition period, which began in earnest after the World IPv6 Launch last year. Today, I want to highlight new network deployments and designs that I like to call “IPv6-centric.” These architectures go beyond the more conservative approach of a congruent dual-stack IP network. Instead, they are designed and operated from the ground up with IPv6 at the base. While these networks can accommodate IPv4, IPv6 takes center stage.

 

IPv6-Centric Mobile Networks: Beginning last month, T-Mobile and Metro PCS users in the United States running the latest version of Android software are now provisioned with IPv6 by default, with no IPv4 address from the ISP network. Traffic to IPv6-enabled destinations such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia will simply use IPv6. Traffic to non-IPv6-enabled sites will be translated to IPv4 after traversing the ISP network. If there are any remaining applications on the device that simply do not know how to handle IPv6, the Android device itself performs and IPv4-to-IPv6 translation internally, so the access network doesn’t see IPv4 at all.

“4G speeds and IoE are driving ‘scale-up’ and ‘scale-out’ in mobile networks. The scarcity of globally routable IPv4 addresses forces a series of compromises that an IPv6-only infrastructure alleviates, providing a solid bedrock to build upon.”

—    Cameron Byrne, T-Mobile Wireless, USA

Continue reading “IPv6-Centric Networking: Innovation Without Constraints”



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TRACFollowing part three of our Big Data in Security series on graph analytics, I’m joined by expert data scientists Dazhuo Li and Jisheng Wang to talk about their work in developing an intelligent anti-spam solution using modern machine learning approaches on Hadoop.

What is ARS and what problem is it trying to solve?

Dazhuo: From a high-level view, Auto Rule Scoring (ARS) is the machine learning system for our anti-spam system. The system receives a lot of email and classifies whether it’s spam or not spam. From a more detailed view, the system has hundreds of millions of sample email messages and each one is tagged with a label. ARS extracts features or rules from these messages, builds a classification model, and predicts whether new messages are spam or not spam. The more variety of spam and ham (non-spam) that we receive the better our system works.

Jisheng: ARS is also a more general large-scale supervised learning use case. Assume you have tens (or hundreds) of thousands of features and hundreds of millions (or even billions) of labeled samples, and you need them to train a classification model which can be used to classify new data in real time.

Spam

Continue reading “Big Data in Security – Part IV: Email Auto Rule Scoring on Hadoop”



Authors

Levi Gundert

Technical Lead

Cisco Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC)

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The Internet of Everything (IoE) is no longer a prediction. It is reality. As I think about the infrastructure needed to truly capture its value, I immediately think the network needs to be:

  • Agile
  • Intelligent
  • Secure

Why are these qualities a necessity for a thriving programmable infrastructure? Simply, it will allow enterprises to be ready for today’s business needs and tomorrow’s new business models.

Business Insights 12 11 13

Organizations must be able to quickly, intelligently and securely leverage their infrastructure to keep pace with business transformation driven by emerging cloud and mobile technology.

Today’s world is dominated by what Gartner Vice President David Cearley calls the “four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information.” An infrastructure must increasingly demonstrate it can add value to the business, by rapidly and securely rolling out new services, apps and capabilities in a connected world.

Read the full article:  An Innovative Infrastructure to Capture the Value of the Internet of Everything



Authors

Jim Grubb

Chief Technology Evangelist

Cisco Customer Experience Center

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As the saying goes, the constants in life are death and taxes. We all know there are more than those two, including change and its counterpart, disruption. Business success will result from responsiveness and adaptation that will happen at a rate and with intelligence that we’ve only begun to get our heads around.  And, most CIOs I speak with are asking about how they can adapt and scale their infrastructure to be prepared as the Internet of Things evolves into the Internet of Everything.

Learn how your infrastructure can be intelligent, flexible and secure during constant business transformation. Click on each interactive tile to discover relevant facts.
Learn how your infrastructure can be intelligent, flexible and secure during constant business transformation. Click on each interactive tile to discover relevant facts.

This change brings big implications for IT. The role of IT is changing, in the face of cloud and mobile apps, and the growing understanding that every company is a technology company. From the consumerization of IT to what Gartner Vice President David Cearley calls the “four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information,” IT must increasingly demonstrate it can add value to the business, by rapidly and securely rolling out new services, apps and capabilities in a connected world.

Continue reading “An Innovative Infrastructure to Capture the Value of the Internet of Everything”



Authors

Jim Grubb

Chief Technology Evangelist

Cisco Customer Experience Center

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When folks ask me what policy actions are going to take place in 2014, an election year, my knee jerk reaction is to say, “not much.”

But when I spend a moment to think about it, there is a substantial agenda of things that can be accomplished next year from a tech industry perspective.   Here’s the short list:

Patent reform – there’s real momentum behind patent reform.  The 325-90 vote in the U.S. House of Representatives shows that support for patent reform is strong and bipartisan.  There will be a hearing in the Senate on December 17, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will hopefully take up the bill soon in the New Year.  This legislation is critically important to help level the playing field against patent assertion entities, which we know as patent trolls. It helps dry up the financial incentives that allow patent trolls to thrive.

E-rate modernization and reform – The FCC has on its docket E-rate modernization.  This program has connected 100,000 schools and libraries to the Internet since its inception in 1996.  Now the program needs to be updated to meet the modern needs of schools and libraries.   Cisco has made 5 major recommendations for reform in our white paper, “High Speed Broadband in Every Classroom: The Promise of a Modernized E-Rate Program.”  We will continue to work with the FCC to get E-rate reform over the finish line in 2014.

Adding more mobile spectrum – Also in front of the FCC is an effort to create more spectrum for WiFi.  There is a looming spectrum crunch in this country, and by 2017, there will be 67 times more mobile internet traffic than in 2007.  That’s like adding double the cars on the beltway each year for the next five years.  We need an all-of-the-above policy on spectrum, and a critical component is more spectrum for wifi in the 5 GHz band as part of a larger effort to add more mobile spectrum.

Trade –  The U.S. has a robust trade agenda in front of it in  2014, and we’re hopeful that there will be significant progress in more areas.  The U.S. made substantial progress in Bali last week.  Now the hard work to get agreements finalized, approved, and ratified must be done.  Trade is critical to helping U.S. companies grow and thrive in overseas markets.

That’s four major issues there.  As my grandmother would say, that’s not chopped liver.

So even in an election year, there’s a considerable amount of work that can and should be done.

 



Authors

Scott Gerber

Senior Manager, Government Affairs

Government Affairs

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Delivering unified management for converged infrastructure solutions, Cisco UCS Director is an award-winning choice for managing your vBlock, FlexPod or other converged infrastructure solution.  In previous blogs, I have mentioned the benefits of Cisco UCS Director:

  • How it abstracts the virtualization, compute, network and storage layers into a single pane of glass that reduces the complexity of managing your data center infrastructure
  • Speaking fluently to Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and EMC or NetApp storage, how your organization receives the full functionality and benefits of the compute, network and storage layers.  As a stocking stuff, the hypervisor layer is included as well.  
  • Lastly, comprehensive management across physical, virtual and bare metal environments from a single pane of glass

Have you ever wondered if there was a way to see Cisco UCS Director in action — live with no strings attached?   

Well Virgina, there is a way for you to do just that.   I am not talking a canned demo or pre-recorded session available for replay.  A real, honest live demo —  and you can speak with our technical experts.     

Numerous sessions are scheduled over the next few months but the next two showings are:  December 17, 2013 and January 14, 2014.  We have two sessions each day to accommodate different time zones — choose the one that best meets your schedule. 

As work begins to slow down in preparation for the holidays, now is the perfect time to take an hour out of your day and learn more about Cisco UCS Director’s centralized automation and management capabilities. It will be an hour well spent.

To reserve your seat, register at:  http://bit.ly/I8Vhr3.    You can also learn more about Cisco UCS Director by going to:   http://buildprice.cisco.com/software/ucs-director

 



Authors

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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In the first part we discussed how video services are evolving within enterprise networks. Content may be sourced from internal servers, BYOD end points or external content providers, thereby creating a mix of managed and unmanaged services. This has led not only to growth in traffic, but also a competition for actual resources between the different types of services.

We have discussed how these services are evolving, now moving to a per application, per session model which ensures that specific resources are allocated depending on the nature of the usage. Tools such as those provided by the medianet architecture, combined with changes in defaulting all traffic within the VPN session back to the corporate network, contribute to this evolution in session management.

Once again, we turn to Thomas Kernen to provide some insight into how recent technology improvements are designed to help with managing video traffic growth and enabling better content distribution models.

Continue reading “MegaTrends: New Video Services and Their Potential Impact on Your Network – Part 2”



Authors

Eric Marin

CTO

Borderless Network Architecture, EMEAR

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In this week’s Engineers Unplugged, Frank Denneman (@FrankDenneman) and Damian Karlson (@sixfootdad) discuss parallels between VHS and traditional storage models, and how all old technology isn’t outdated. This is a great discussion about the role flash storage plays vs array. So be kind, rewind, and let’s dig into the theory behind the evolving storage models:

 

This episode was powered not just by unicorns, but by stroopwafels.
This episode was powered not just by unicorns, but by stroopwafels.

**The next shoot is last week of January at Cisco Live in Milan! If you want to be internet-famous, contact me ASAP to talk about being on the show.**

This is 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

Join the behind the scenes by liking Engineers Unplugged on Facebook.



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NHLUCS

Speed is one thing that Cisco UCS and the NHL’s Minnesota Wild franchise share in common. If you have ever been to a professional hockey game you recognized and probably came to appreciate the speed, skill, and nimbleness of the players out on the ice. For Cisco UCS, speed is an attribute inherent in what we do, too – our compute business is highly competitive and requires constant, skillful, and quick innovation to deliver the best and newest in technology to our customers.

The NHL’s Minnesota Wild franchise rely on a Cisco UCS based I.T. infrastructure for their Microsoft Dynamics and CRM software portfolio. To better serve and interact with clients the Wild I.T. staff established three goals for their recent IT infrastructure transformation project:

  • Simplify infrastructure to boost staff productivity,
  • Improve resource management for controlled growth
  • Promote sustainability to conserve resources and provide environmentally conscious facilities for clients.

Looking at their long-term goals for cloud computing, the Wild staff decided to invest in a solution based on our Unified Computing System™ (UCS®) servers with Tegile based hybrid storage solutions. In doing so, the Wild established for them a highly agile data center environment that supports their current and future cloud initiatives with a virtual desktop infrastructure solution. The end results of the I.T. transformation project for the Wild were impressive as they:

  • Achieved 43 percent reduction in support costs
  • Reduced power by 63 percent and heat output by 68 percent
  • Reduced data from 42TB to 17TB

Once again we see the UCS architecture delivering improved performance at lower operating costs for a Microsoft oriented environment – Dynamics and CRM. In the case of the Minnesota Wild, a small I.T. organization when compared with larger enterprise I.T. organizations, they were able to deliver significant business value to their organization and position themselves for future technology shifts. Read more about the Minnesota Wild and their Cisco UCS experience here.

Learn more about Cisco’s Unified Data Center Microsoft solution capabilities at www.cisco.com/go/microsoft.



Authors

Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud