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A memory error is a condition that occurs any time one or more bits being read from memory have changed state from what was previously written.  By even the most conservative of estimates Internet devices experience more than 600,000 memory errors per day.  Cosmic radiation, operating a device outside its recommended environmental conditions, and defects in manufacturing can all cause a “1” in memory to become a “0” or vice-versa.  Most of these bit errors are harmless, but occasionally the bit error occurs inside a domain name or URL, and this can affect where Internet traffic is directed.  The term “bitsquatting”, which refers to the practice of registering a domain name one binary digit different than another, is a term coined after a similar term, “cybersquatting” –the practice of registering an unofficial domain which could be confused for a legitimate one.

For example, the fully qualified domain name “www.cisco.com” could by changing only a single binary digit become the bitsquat domain name “wwwncisco.com”.  In this example, the dot separating the second and third level domain names has experienced a bit error, and changed to become the letter “n”.

Binary representation of a dot versus the character "n"
Binary representation of a dot versus the character “n”

Continue reading “Error Correction Using Response Policy Zones: Eliminating the Problem of Bitsquatting”



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Jaeson Schultz

Technical Leader

Cisco Talos Security Intelligence & Research

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Now that OpenDaylight has arrived, it’s time to explain why I made the Open Source choices eventually embraced by its Founders and the community at large.  One doesn’t often see such leaders as Cisco, IBM, Intel, HP, Juniper, RedHat, VMWare, NEC, Microsoft and others agree, share and collaborate on such key technologies, let alone the latter engaging in a Linux Foundation based community (some thought hell will freeze over before that would ever happen, though it got pretty cold at times last Spring).

For those of you not familiar with OpenDaylight (see “Meet Me On The Equinox”, not a homage to Death Cab for Cutie or my Transylvanian homeland), IBM and Cisco have actually started this with an amazing set of partners, nearly that ephemeral Equinox this year (~11am, March 20th) though we couldn’t quite brag about it until all our partners saw the daylight, which by now, we’re hoping everyone does.  It was hard not to talk about all this as we saw those half baked, speculative stories before the Equinox – amazing how information flew, distorted as it were, but it did; I wish source code would be that “rapid”, we’d all be so much better for it…

The Open Source model for OpenDaylight is simple, it has only two parts: the community is hosted in the Linux Foundation and the license is Eclipse.  The details are neatly captured in a white paper we wrote and published in the Linux Foundation.  Dan Frye, my friend and fellow counterpart at IBM and I came up with the main points after two short meetings.  It would have been one, but when you work for such giants as our parent companies and soon to be OpenDaylight partners, one has to spend a little more time getting everyone to see the daylight.  It boils down to two things, which I am convinced are the quintessential elements of any successful open source project.

1) Community.  Why?  Because it trumps everything: code, money and everything else.  A poor community with great code equals failure (plenty of examples of that).  A great community with poor (or any) code equals success (plenty of examples of that too).  Why? Because open source equals collaboration, of the highest kind: I share with you, and you with me, whatever I have, I contribute my time, my energy, my intellectual property, my reputation, etc.. And ultimately it becomes “ours”.  And the next generation’s.  Open Source is not a technology; it’s a development model.  With more than 10 million open source developers world wide, it happens to be based on collaboration on a scale and diversity that humanity has never experienced before.  Just think about what made this possible and the role some of the OpenDaylight partners have already played in it since the dawn of the Internet.  Dan Frye and I agreed that the Linux Kernel community is the best in the world and so we picked the closest thing to it to model and support ours, the Linux Foundation.

2) Fragmentation, or anti-fragmentation, actually.  Why?  The biggest challenge of any open source project is how to avoid fragmentation (the opposite of collaboration).  Just ask Andy Rubin and the Android guys what they fear the most.  Just ask any open source project’s contributors, copyright holders, or high priests, how much they appreciate an open source parasite that won’t give back.  Though we would have liked to go deeper, we settled on Eclipse, largely because of the actual language and technology we dealt with in the OpenDaylight Controller: most, if not all the initial code is Java, and though some are worried about that, I’m sure Jim Gosling is proud (btw, I’m not sure the Controller has to stay that way, I actually agree with Amin Vahdat), but we had to start somewhere.  Plus having a more friendly language NB (northbound, as in the applications run on top of the Controller) is such a cool thing, we think that the #1 open source (Eclipse) and the #1 commercial (Microsoft) IDE’s are going to be very good to it, so why not?  There are more reasons that pointed in the Eclipse direction, and other reasons for such wonderful alternatives (as APL or MPL, perhaps the subject of another post, some day).  But when it comes to understanding the virtues of them all, no one understands them better than the amazing founders of these license models, most of them from IBM, of course (I wish they did that when I was there).

What happened between the Equinox and Solstice is a fascinating saga within the OpenDaylight community which I think played its course in the spirit of total and complete openness, inclusion, diversity, respect of the individual and the community, and most of all, that code rules – we do believe in running code and community consensus.  I tip my hat to all my fellow colleagues that learned these two things along the way, the enormous talent at the Eclipse and Linux Foundation that helped us launch, and even the analysts who tried (and did incredibly well at times) to speculate the secret reasons why these partners came up with the model we did: there is no secret at all, my friends, we’re simply creating a community that is truly open, diverse, inclusive, and never fragmented.  Just like a big, happy family.  Welcome to OpenDaylight, we hope you’ll stay!



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071913 MI MissionPeninsula-31-1

After a refreshing summer road trip through the beautiful Michigan Upper Peninsula I am happy to be back at work.  I even got a fresh perspective on the phrase “cherry picking”.

 

 

Henry Moore Nuclear Energy sculptureThe geek in me got to see the “Nuclear Energy” sculpture at site where Enrico Fermi’s Manhattan Project team devised a nuclear reactor to produce the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago. ( image from – http://www.chicagobauhausbeyond.org/ )

 

 

While I was away, I missed an interesting webinar on optimizing operations of Cisco Data Center environments with converged infrastructure management. Thanks to video archiving, I was able to review it this week. EMA analyst Jim Frey gave a comprehensive view of data center management using converged infrastructure.  Some key takeaways from my perspective were:

  1. Converged infrastructure will usher in a renewed focus on application performance and service quality.
  2. The need for automated discovery and configuration will become all the more important with converged infrastructure.
  3. The increased interest in converged infrastructure answered my question “Was 2012 year of the converged infrastructure solutions”

It was very interesting to see a customer – Molina Healthcare – discuss their journey to a service oriented data center.  The reorganization of the IT department along the lines of service delivery was fascinating.  Like other UCS customers, they had seen quantifiable benefits from the Cisco UCS management capabilities.

  • Speed of deployment improved 50- 75% (down to 1 week from 2-4 weeks)
  • Support costs reduced by 60%.
  • Discernable improvements in reliability and availability of the infrastructure.

As integrated infrastructure gains importance in data centers with physical and virtual environments that support application services, simplified management of these assets becomes very important.  The Cisco UCS management portfolio was recently enhanced with the Cisco UCS Director. It provides unified management of industry-leading integrated infrastructure solutions that Cisco delivers with EMC (VSPEX) Continue reading “Cisco UCS in a converged world”



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Partner-Weekly-Rewind-v2Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Off the Top

There are huge opportunities for growth in the mid-market and Cisco wants to help partners address that market. In fact, our research indicates the total addressable market for technology in mid-market is $25 billion and for services it’s $30 billion by the year 2016.

This is just some of the information that Bruce Klein brought you this week in his blog “Accelerating Our Mutual Success in the Mid-Market.” Even more exciting was the announcement of the consolidation of the Partner Led and Global Virtual Sales teams under the leadership of John Donovan.

Be sure to read Bruce’s blog to get up to speed on Cisco’s mid-market growth strategy. Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – August 2, 2013”



Authors

Anna Sui

Social Media Strategist

Global Partner Marketing, Cisco

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Hey folks, I’m back in the blogosphere to make a super exciting announcement.

The Cisco Aironet 3600 Series Access Point with its purpose built best-in-class Wireless performance, industry’s first and only Enterprise Class AP to support 802.11n with 4×4 MIMO architecture, and signature modular design was launched in January 2012 at Cisco Live! London. Cisco was first to market with an 802.11ac wave 1 solution and first to be published with WiFi Alliance certification. Just 18 months since launching, the flagship 3600 AP has now surpassed the ONE MILLION mark in units shipped!

We designed the access point with modular architecture in mind to give our customers more flexibility for upcoming technological innovations in the wireless space. Since the initial launch, we have announced three exciting modules tailored to help our customers meet their wireless needs: Wireless Security and Spectrum Intelligence, 3G Small Cell, and most recently 802.11ac Wave 1. The modules have been extremely successful, having deployed 40K units of the .11ac module and 10K units of the Wireless Security and Spectrum Intelligence module, which speaks volumes about the versatility of the 3600 Access Point. Continue reading “Cisco Aironet 3600 AP Passes 1 Million Units Shipped!”



Authors

Mark Denny

Senior PLM

Mobility

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Even our writing needs a vacation once in a while and to come back more inspired. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and forget about all the fun things we can try. Here are some tips I’m starting to resurrect:

Be timely

Try to include references (or even visuals) to things people are talking about. It makes a piece more fun but also helps it to come up in a web search. Try to place trending words in your headline or the first couple of sentences. Reference news headlines, even holidays.

Draft, then craft

Write fast with the words that first come to you. Come back later to put in commas and edit; it’ll flow better with your first thoughts. Jot down ideas as they appear to you. Especially while surfing the web, it’s easy to get 100 clicks from your subject before you write anything. Write down your thoughts …then go to the web to fill in with examples and facts.

Write when the ideas come to you

In author Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine:  How Creativity Works, he talks about how our best creativity comes to us when we least expect it, but says especially as we become older, we hold back and become too self aware of the details. He says, “Let go!”

I do a lot of my writing on the weekends as I’m always more relaxed then. I even pull off the road and write blogs on my iphone because I think of ideas while I drive. I know I won’t remember if I wait. In this Cisco blog, I talk about How to be more ‘wild and crazy’ in your online world.  

Have your content drive your product

Whether it’s a blog (or presentation), it can often turn out better if you first look for interesting stories, hooks and visuals, and then wrap the piece around those. Don’t stay too married to a framework – keep it fluid to match what you find.

Mix it up

This is my favorite. Include short and long sentences in your writing. Often a two- or three-word sentence really makes a piece pop. The same goes for paragraphs (include long ones and short ones).

Use fun punctuation.

·      Use an exclamation point after a sentence once in a while.

·      Dashes are great! I like to use them instead of commas sometimes – they’re useful to set off words or phrases that interrupt a sentence.

·      Colons:  They’re fun to use but remember to capitalize the first word after the colon if that phrase can stand on its own. Leave it lower case if not.

·      Parenthesis help you include detail (but don’t overuse them).

·      And italicizing words is a great way to add emphasis.

I’d love to hear your tips for making online writing more fun so I can use them the next time I get stuck in a rut.

Mary
On Twitter at @marygorges

 

 

 

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With the prevalence of mobile devices connecting people and things today, we are seeing a base expectation for uncompromised wireless connectivity. There is no doubt that the trend for high performance, pervasive wireless is on the rise and will continue for the foreseeable future. We at Cisco strive to help organizations get ahead of these trends with solutions that can be deployed with confidence today.  That’s why I am proud to announce the latest Cisco Wireless Release 7.5, the third feature-rich release we’ve had in the last 12 months.

Release 7.5 enables mission critical wireless deployments with sub-second stateful failover for wireless clients, wire-like Gigabit performance with the 802.11ac Module, and a bevy of other features.

Key Features in 7.5:



Authors

Palani Karuppan

Product Manager

Cisco Wireless Networking

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FlexPod WebinarCisco and NetApp continue to drive innovation with new FlexPod offerings that enable organizations to address their business needs while reducing risk and increasing IT efficiency and agility. FlexPod combines the Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco Nexus data center switches, and NetApp storage components and provides a powerful platform for critical application workloads.

With joint validated designs and integrations with Microsoft Windows Server®, Microsoft Hyper-V™, and System Center, FlexPod provides an ideal platform for Microsoft Private Cloud deployments, allowing customers to accelerate private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivery.

Please join us on Wednesday, August 7, 11 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, when we will kick-off a technical series detailing FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud. In this live webinar, presented by Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and NetApp, you hear from technical experts on the following topics: Continue reading “FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud – Best Practices Webcast”



Authors

Gary Serda

Senior Strategic Partner Marketing Manager

Global Partner Marketing

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What do you think should be connected to the Internet of Everything?

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Last week, Cisco and WIRED.com asked that very question as part of an all-day Tweet Chat, stirring up a huge amount of conversation around the connection possibilities of the future! Throughout the day, readers submitted their ideas of what could connect on IoE, tagging their responses with #IoE and @Cisco to join the chat. Submissions were featured on the WIRED.com homepage as part of a special homepage module.

  Screen Shot 2013-07-23 at 4.16.05 PM Continue reading “Cisco and WIRED.com #IoE Tweet Chat Recap”