2013 - Page 9 of 232 - Cisco Blogs

December 11, 2013 8 Comments

SDN Reflections on the London Gartner Data Center Conference – Part 2

Last week I started my SDN reflections on the London Gartner Data Center Conference, and I found I had quite a lot to discuss.

Last week I covered:

Do we need SDN?
SDN and the Gartner Hype Cycle
SDN Deployment Models

So here is the concluding part. This week I’ll cover:

Overlay-Based SDN — and the questionable assumptions being made by others in this area (good for Gartner for calling these out!)
The SDN Vendor Explosion Challenge,
The “Unspoken Costs” of SDN Deployment, and
The “How” of SDN is still missing.

I hope you find this useful and informative and as always, feel free to debate with me around my observations!

Continue reading “SDN Reflections on the London Gartner Data Center Conference – Part 2”

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

2 Comments

Partner Voices: Removing Risk, Lowering Cost – The MCPc & Cisco Partnership

David Durham

As part of our ongoing Partner Voices blog series, we had the opportunity to hear from MCPc. During the past 11 years, MCPc has bet long on Cisco, using networking, switching, telepresence, and digital media tools within its own business and in the outstanding help for the business of its clients.

For example, since the beginning of 2013, MCPc has used Cisco Telepresence internally for more than 4,320 hours of cumulative communication. That is more than 180 full days of time. Most MCPc associates have Jabber on their mobile devices, and their local media is paying attention to the ways in which MCPc has implemented Cisco throughout the company. But MCPc does more than just make its own travel schedule easier for employees – it has enabled clients to take advantage of Cisco’s full breadth of offerings. Continue reading “Partner Voices: Removing Risk, Lowering Cost – The MCPc & Cisco Partnership”

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

Big Data in Security – Part III: Graph Analytics

Levi Gundert

Following part two of our Big Data in Security series on University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab stack, I caught up with talented data scientists Michael Howe and Preetham Raghunanda to discuss their exciting graph analytics work.

Where did graph databases originate and what problems are they trying to solve?

Michael: Disparate data types have a lot of connections between them and not just the types of connections that have been well represented in relational databases. The actual graph database technology is fairly nascent, really becoming prominent in the last decade. It’s been driven by the cheaper costs of storage and computational capacity and especially the rise of Big Data.

There have been a number of players driving development in this market, specifically research communities and businesses like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. These organizations are looking at large volumes of data with lots of inter-related attributes from multiple sources. They need to be able to view their data in a much cleaner fashion so that the people analyzing it don’t need to have in-depth knowledge of the storage technology or every particular aspect of the data. There are a number of open source and proprietary graph database solutions to address these growing needs and the field continues to grow.

Continue reading “Big Data in Security – Part III: Graph Analytics”

Levi Gundert

Technical Lead

Cisco Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC)

4 Comments

Accelerating the Performance of Graphics-Intensive VDI

Tony Paikeday

The VDI landscape is increasingly evolving to embrace virtual desktops that look, perform, and respond like their physical predecessors. Whether it’s application responsiveness with low latency across the network, or high-performance storage with expansive IOPS capacity that mirrors the native experience on one’s desktop/laptop, implementers and users expect their virtual desktops to behave akin to physical.

These technological achievements have led to increasingly successful virtual desktop deployments for knowledge workers and task workers, but not so much so for users of 3D graphics applications traditionally running on high-end dedicated graphics workstations. Across many industries and verticals like Manufacturing/Design, Higher Ed, and Healthcare, you’ll find end users needing access to immersive 3D graphics applications.

Cisco, Citrix and NVIDIA are pleased to be at the forefront of extending the applicability of VDI for graphics-intensive use cases, enabled by our jointly validated solution architectures based on Cisco Unified Computing, NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ and Citrix XenDesktop. This joint solution offers affordable, scalable performance for graphics-intensive VDI use cases, built on an optimized computing infrastructure from Cisco. Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is the foundation of Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions. Cisco UCS provides an end-to-end, service-and-application optimized platform for mobile, virtual workspaces. The embedded NVIDIA GRID solution enables GPU sharing without sacrificing application compatibility or the user experience. Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp deliver desktops and applications as on demand services that tap into the benefits of GPU resources. With our combined desktop virtualization solution, we’re expanding the utility, reach and performance of VDI.

Learn more about Cisco, Citrix and NVIDIA joint solutions for immersive 3D graphics in virtualized environments by checking out this helpful Solution Overview

For more information on NVIDIA GRID™:

NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ – www.nvidia.com/vgpu
NVIDIA GRID™ main website – www.nvidia.com/vdi
NVIDIA GRID™ K1 & K2 boards -http://www.nvidia.com/object/grid-boards.html

For more information on Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions with Citrix: www.cisco.com/go/citrix

Tony Paikeday

December 10, 2013 Leave a Comment

A Room with a View (of Crucial Big Data Insights)

Rachael McBrearty

What’s the problem with Big Data? You guessed right — it’s BIG.

Big Data empowers organizations to discern patterns that were once invisible, leading to breakthrough ideas and transformed business performance. But there is simply so much of it, and from such myriad sources — customers, competitors, mobile, social, web, transactional, operational, internal, external, structured, and unstructured — that, for many organizations, Big Data is overwhelming. The torrents of data will only increase as the Internet of Everything spreads its ever-expanding wave of connectivity, from 10 billion connected things today to 50 billion in 2020.

So, how can organizations learn to use all of that data?

The key lies not in simply having access to enormous data streams. Information must be filtered for crucial, actionable insights, and presented to the right people in a visualized, comprehensible form. Only then will Big Data transform business strategies and decisions. In effect, Big Data must be made small.

However, as McKinsey & Co. reported, many organizations don’t have enough data scientists, much less ones who understand the business well enough to draw conclusions. The trick is to get the scientists together with the experts who understand the business levers driving the organization. Put them in a room with the right tools, and watch the synergy fly.

But what sort of a room?

Continue reading “A Room with a View (of Crucial Big Data Insights)”

Rachael McBrearty

Chief Creative and Group Leader

Cisco Consulting Services

Cisco Introduces New Solutions for EMC VSPEX

Tim Stack

The Cisco and EMC teams have been working closely to expand the VSPEX solution portfolio to accelerate growth and opportunity. In addition to the new CVDs, we released a new application white paper and management design guide for VSPEX. Wait, there’s more. We also recently published new Cisco marketing collateral for VSPEX and a customer case study. Let’s take a moment and provide some details.

The two new CVDs are designed to facilitate the deployment of virtualized infrastructure. In this instance, customers can choose between VMware vSphere 5.1 or 5.5 for 300, 600, and 1000 virtual machines.

These new presized and validated solutions simplify virtualization deployment for businesses using VMware vSphere software. The solutions use the very latest Cisco UCS Servers and EMC VNX Series Storage. Customers can feel confident they are deploying the correct balance of computing, networking and storage resource using best of breed technology from Cisco and EMC.

One of the key value propositions for VSPEX is that it enables applications to be up and running more rapidly than a build your own infrastructure solution. Providing application guidance is the next logical step so the team created a SharePoint 2013 on VSPEX white paper. Customers can now rapidly build and deploy robust, high-performance SharePoint 2013 collaborative environments on VSPEX with Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0.

Being able to simply manage an integrated infrastructure is critical. Hence, we introduced a UCS Director Implementation Guide for EMC VSPEX. This new implementation guide provides step by step instructions on how to setup, configure and operate VSPEX via Cisco UCS Director. Cisco UCS Director delivers unified integrated infrastructure management for administering computing, network, virtualization, and storage from one self-service web interface.

Please watch Jim McHugh, VP of Cisco UCS Marketing, discuss VSPEX’s value proposition, momentum, and new solutions.

Finally, and most importantly, our customers are seeing real value from VSPEX. The John Fabick Tractor Company (Fabick Cat) deployed VSPEX to improve performance and reduce costs. Fabick Cat experienced the following results:

Up to 25% better performance
78% reduction in software virtualization costs
Zero downtime since being deployed

I urge you to read the complete Fabick Cat case study on how they leveraged VSPEX’s flexibility and scalability to easily provision new servers and add additional storage.

Kudos to the Cisco and EMC teams for their timely execution of the CVDs, implementation guide, and white paper. Please also read Chad Dunn’s, Director of VSPEX Business Operations at EMC, blog post on our new CVDs.

To learn more about Cisco’s solutions for EMC VSPEX download our new brochure or visit www.cisco.com/go/vspex.

Tim Stack

Product Marketing Manager

Data Center and Virtualization

1 Comment

Unlocking Wi-Fi Enabled Value-Added Services

Stuart Taylor

Competing with the virtual, e-commerce world is becoming increasingly challenging for real-world businesses. Traditional retailers have long envied the massive amounts of valuable data that online retailers have available to help them better understand customer behavior and implement winning marketing tactics. Online retailers know valuable information such as how frequently customers return, how long they spend on their sites, what the customers looked at but didn’t buy, and where they went before and after coming to the site. Businesses as diverse as hotels, banks, stadiums, airports, and large public venues are all looking for ways to get similar detailed data on customer activities in their facilities, so they can improve the customer experience and their bottom lines. The data and insights have not been available to bricks-and-mortar facilities, until now.

That situation is changing through the growing availability of Wi-Fi in business locations. Many retailers, hotels, and other businesses are increasingly offering Wi-Fi as a service that allows their customers to connect mobile devices to the Internet. Hidden in this valuable service is a vast amount of information and insight, which retailers and others can use to deliver tangible value to their bottom lines. Hypersensitive location information, device details, identification of returning customers, and sophisticated path analysis are just some of the customer data captured by Wi-Fi networks. Businesses are now realizing that the data and capabilities offer new ways to improve the customer experience and support a range of market-leading monetization models.

For many businesses, these new location-based experiences and Continue reading “Unlocking Wi-Fi Enabled Value-Added Services”

Stuart Taylor

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

1 Comment

Courts Excellence in a Changing World: Highlights from Day 1

Kacey Carpenter

I am fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Courts Excellence in a Changing World conference in Dubai, UAE this week. Hosted by the International Association for Court Administration (IACA) in association with the Dubai Courts and the DIFC Courts as host judiciary.

This event in Dubai is the first of its kind in the Middle East region and the sixth International Conference to be held by IACA and the largest so far with representation from over 50 countries around the world.

The agenda’s theme is “Court Excellence in a Changing World” with leaders from judicial organizations from the Middle East and all over the world attending to share, and gain knowledge about best practices, latest strategies for change and successful examples of court efficiency.

Continue reading “Courts Excellence in a Changing World: Highlights from Day 1”

Kacey Carpenter

Senior Manager

Global Government and Public Sector Marketing

2 Comments

Big Data in Security – Part II: The AMPLab Stack

Levi Gundert

Following part one of our Big Data in Security series on TRAC tools, I caught up with talented data scientist Mahdi Namazifar to discuss TRAC’s work with the Berkeley AMPLab Big Data stack.

Researchers at University of California, Berkeley AMPLab built this open source Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (BDAS), starting at the bottom what is Mesos?

AMPLab is looking at the big data problem from a slightly different perspective, a novel perspective that includes a number of different components. When you look at the stack at the lowest level, you see Mesos, which is a resource management tool for cluster computing. Suppose you have a cluster that you are using for running Hadoop Map Reduce jobs, MPI jobs, and multi-threaded jobs. Mesos manages the available computing resources and assigns them to different kinds of jobs running on the cluster in an efficient way. In a traditional Hadoop cluster, only one Map-Reduce job is running at any given time and that job blocks all the cluster resources. Mesos on the other hand, sits on top of a cluster and manages the resources for all the different types of computation that might be running on the cluster. Mesos is similar to Apache YARN, which is another cluster resource management tool. TRAC doesn’t currently use Mesos.

Continue reading “Big Data in Security – Part II: The AMPLab Stack”

Authors

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

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Content Strategist

Channels

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Technical Lead

Cisco Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC)

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Authors

Chief Creative and Group Leader

Cisco Consulting Services

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Product Marketing Manager

Data Center and Virtualization

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Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

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Senior Manager

Global Government and Public Sector Marketing

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Technical Lead

Cisco Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC)

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