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The Internet of Everything portends a world filled with trillions of sensors and while their practical applications seem clear – sensing water loss, traffic patterns, the growth of forests – it’s the unforeseen knowledge that they can produce that is going to be exciting in the future.

Here’s a project that opened a few eyes: Trash Track.  Carlo Ratti directs the MIT SENSEable City Lab, which explores the “real-time city” by studying the way sensors and electronics relate to the city around us. He’s opening a research center in Singapore as part of an MIT-led initiative on the Future of Urban Mobility.

Continue reading “Surprising Wisdom from Tracked Trash”



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In this week’s episode of Engineer’s Unplugged, we take a practical look at some of the business challenges presented when storage, network, and compute teams are asked to work together. Cisco’s Andrew Levin (@AndLevin) and NexusIS’s Paul Sferratore (@MadItalianATL) approach some of the questions in the unified fabric strategy in terms of roles. Should roles drive tools or vice versa?

Andrew and Paul talk roles, cost effectiveness, and unified management:

Andrew Levin and Paul Sferratore draw a unified unicorn.
Andrew Levin and Paul Sferratore draw a unified unicorn.

Welcome to 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

What’s your opinion? Join the conversation on Twitter by following @CiscoDC. Slots are almost gone for Engineers Unplugged Season 4 Taping at #VMworld! Contact me @CommsNinja to claim yours.



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I have previously written a few details about our upcoming ultra low latency solution for High Performance Computing (HPC).  Since my last blog post, a few of you sent me emails asking for more technical details about it.

So let’s just put it all out there.

Continue reading “Ultra low latency Ethernet (UCS “usNIC”): questions and answers”



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Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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With the explosion of movies and TV programs available to consumers on any device, traditionally siloed content management systems are straining to keep up. Complicating things further is auxiliary content around each title such as poster artwork, chapter thumbnails, supplementary videos. Throw in to the mix music, e-books and digital comics and the content management challenges become near impossible. Unifying the content management systems is key to solving these challenges, and Cisco Videoscape Media Suite is the unified CMS leading the way.

Learn more about digital media content management by joining our webinar this week.

Title: Unifying Digital Media Content Management – Handling the Complexity Of All Media
Date: Thursday, July 18 Continue reading “Join Webinar on Unifying Digital Media Content Management”



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Ying Shen

No Longer with Cisco

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This is a follow up from my post last week that announced this webcast. Today it was a treat to have Richard Noguera as our special guest and who is uniquely qualified to speak on the topic of key imperatives for today’s CISO for the data center.  Rich is a youthful InfoSec veteran who has led teams at Yahoo, Symantec and McAfee as well as held consulting roles and presently at Accenture in a Security and Risk management strategy role. I wanted to provide you access to the slides as well as summarize some of the key points Rich educated us on today.

 

As a concept, cloud is the one that most interested our audience today. We are seeing heavily virtualized data centers with private clouds, cloud attached data centers that leverage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) facilities for rapid service deployment or capacity management, and hybrid clouds that mix/match based on implementation needs.  Most of our customers have embraced one of the above models.  And, so I am going to focus on our imperatives accordingly.

Imperative 1: Enable IT to Play a More Strategic Role

Gartner predicts with market maturity that enterprises will increase migration of *mission-critical* functions to *public* cloud services over the next 3-5 years. IT and InfoSec must adapt and consider an alternative means to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their business services, data, and users. For the ‘extended enterprise’ to operate effectively then, access control and data exchange between cloud service providers (CSP) needs to be standardized. Organizations should look to implement a Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) – whether internally or externally, utilizing private/public/hybrid clouds – to accelerate service implementation and integration and also ensure visibility and cohesive security policy across multiple cloud service providers.

Imperative 2:  Business-driven Security and Risk Metrics

Continue reading “Three Imperatives for Today’s CISO for Data Center Security: Key Takeaways from Today’s Webcast”



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Evelyn de Souza

Cloud Data Governance Leader

Chief Technology and Architecture Office

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Recently I spent time at Cisco Live Orlando where I caught up with Trey Layton, CTO, VCE. We had an opportunity to talk about automation and orchestration of Vblock with Cisco UCS Director (formerly Cloupia). Over recent months, we have been doing even more work for our customers, collectively between our companies, to do deeper integration and to simplify the management, administration, provisioning and automation of our converged infrastructures.

As we see the continued trend to move to a services model in IT and adopt a private cloud infrastructure, Cisco UCS Director is the only solution to provide single pane of glass automation and provisioning of all virtual and physical assets and can provide end-to-end orchestration across server, network and storage resources.  With Vblock, it provides our mutual customers an elastic pool of resources to be able to consume and adapt to various applications and use cases that customers are deploying in the virtualized or bare metal environments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vjFgYmIaCU

We are excited about the developments around both what UCS Director and Vblock are delivering, and there is a lot more in the works moving forward to continue to support simplification and agility for our customers’ data center architecture.

  • The next release of UCS Director will add VMAX and VNXE storage support to the product by September.  This will allow UCS Director to support all Vblock models with complete server, network and storage provisioning automation.
  • The UCS Director task library will include over 50 Vblock specific tasks to allow users to easily build model-based automation workflows to dynamically provision the system.

Cisco continues to innovate, delivering technology and solutions that provide real value to our customers. Tomorrow starts here.



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Within the coming decade, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) will be key to enabling 50 billion connections among people, processes, data, and things in the Internet of Everything (IoE)But how we get there from here is not a simple matter.

I’m very pleased to invite Mark Townsley, Cisco Fellow and recognized industry expert on IP, to discuss this important transition in the second of our three-part blog series on IPv6. The first blog in Mark’s series was “Demystifying IPv6”.

townsley

Three years ago, I organized a conference in Paris where I thought it would be fascinating to bring together the original designers of IPv6 alongside the engineers who were finally deploying it at scale more than a decade later. During this discussion, Steve Deering, one of the “fathers” of IPv6 in the 1990s, was asked one of the most common questions about IPv6: Why wasn’t it designed for backward compatibility with IPv4? After all, wouldn’t it be easier to make the transition if the two versions could transparently coexist? Steve answered that the problem is not that IPv6 wasn’t designed to be backward-compatible—the real problem is that IPv4 wasn’t designed to be forward-compatible.

Steve was making the point that IPv4 was designed with a fixed address space. Given the number of computers connected to the Arpanet throughout the 1970s, this fixed-length address field seemed to be sufficient—at least for that version of IP. IP had been replaced before, and it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that it might be replaced again. Continue reading “Moving to IPv6: Rebuilding the Heart of the Internet Without Missing a Beat”



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Be nimble, be agile, take informed risks, and apply innovation to how you’re using data in your business. That’s the strategy of Garry Whatley, VP of IT and business services for Staples Australia, and it’s been paying off.

Whatley believes that in the online retail industry, with high volume and large amounts of data, access to that data and analytics is essential. And to get this, the retailer would have to make a considerable investment in technology.

With a strong partnership in the past, Staples consulted with Cisco for expertise and implementation of a sturdy IT foundation. Together, they chose to implement the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco® Unified Computing System™ and the Cisco Business Warehouse Accelerator to deliver the most effective technologies to achieve its vision.

Upon implementation, Staples began its mission to gain a strategic advantage. Regular automated reporting now allows for visibility around performance levels, and inventory management is much simpler and more efficient with data transparency.

The investment has allowed Staples Australia to become more agile and respond to the insight they receive. In addition, customer service is progressing and inventory holding has been decreasing. And there’s more to come. Staples will be integrating more functionality into its business operations, allowing for automation and breakdown reporting of sales, trends, and customer actions.

Read the full article from Unleashing IT.

 



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Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial

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Since you’re reading this chances are that you are either in IT, wanna be in IT or you think this is some motivation “You Can Do It!” kinda post. Weird starting a blog out about telling folks how to work around our incredibility well thought out information technology policies. This is certainly not a Eric Snowden type of outing but really more of how we as the IT Crowd have to work with other IT departments that, hey let’s face it man; are just not as good as us right?! Can I get a witness up in here!!!

We’ve all made silly IT policies that at the time really seemed like a great idea…you know like password types so complicated that they had to be wrote down?? Heck at my first crack at LAN Administration way back in the Johnson Administration, I required; Unknown letter combo, numbers, mixed case, special character, map to hidden Amber Room and you best possible guess to the Riemann Hypothesis. Oh it was secure for sure…of course it was over a proprietary protocol network type called ScaNET…so that was a resume generating event.

Anyway…

How many times as an IT geek do you just get fire ant angry when a company blocks PINGs!!??! Or turning off rights inheritance; heck I’m still seeing a therapist over that event. Well, that and troubleshooting a system trust issue with over 10K user accounts…thru NAT…internal NAT!!…Yeah I know right!! oh the horror!!! Eli Roth’s next movie…

Here’s a few tricks I’ve picked up along the way to help…solve problems…

Workaround 00×01: No PING!!! Turning off antivirus and violating RFC’s 792 and 4443 should be punished by having to play the video game Desert Bus until you get high score. When I need to test a connection with ICMP blocked, I just use HPing3  http://wiki.hping.org/ It’s small  lightweight (wrote in TCL) and works great! For example;

techwisetvNIX#hping3 –S <target IP address> -p80 –c 4

This will send SYN packets (-S flag)  to port 80 (-p80 flag) four time (-c flag) instead of ICMP to test connections or even run a speed test to determine bandwidth. HPing3 has a TON of options. I use it to test firewalls too…but I’ll save that for another blog…

Workaround 00×02: “We disabled robots so hackers can’t GoogleDork us!” Aw! That’s so cute! However, if you’ve been around networking awhile you know the answer to all questions is not 42 but; “it depends” Certainly GoogleDorking is fun and an OK way to scare the crap out of analyst who think an IP address is where they go to the bathroom. Practically speaking, when I need that kinda vuln info; I’mheadin’ on over to Shodan.  http://www.shodanhq.com/  and letting my fingers do the walking. It’s a search engine that searches on metadata about machines. So the idea isn’t to search about content that’s available on the Internet like GoogleDorking can be.  For example; let say I’m looking for a vuln in IOS 15.1, well, I just type ‘er in the search bar and KA-ZOW! Global results! SHODAN uses a variety of techniques to actually determine the version. These may be through SNMP, fingerprinting, SSH, telnet, etc… But either way, it returns what it found as far as devices that are running that version of code. Very cool tool…and oh by the way…there’s a Shodan iPhone app for the; “geek on the go” I use as another tool for security auditing to tell folks to update  your code goobers…especially the SCADA folks… Why do I need to us this? It’s another great way to find info and see our network as the world sees it, other then thru Google lens… Honorable mention: Duck Duck Go.

Workaround 00×03: Internet access is filtered! There could be many reasons IT departments block access to certain sites. It could be security issues, it could be State/Government issues, maybe someone doesn’t like you looking at cats walking in socks wearing trucker hats. Heck man, I have no idea. I do know this, when I was in the United States Navy before we pulled into a port, the Skipper would tell everyone were not to go and places to avoid. Those were the first places we hit! It served as a tour map for some rockin’ great stories later on!  Folks are gonna find a way…

TOR (The Onion Router https://www.torproject.org/)  Is the true Magsaysay Blvd of the Internet. Tor is basically an anonymizer. Many apps will over over TOR too. Rule of thumb, if it runs on TCP it’ll work.  TOR bounces your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world. This multi-branch routing prevents folks from snooping your Internet activity. Why would you want to do that? Well, if you’re traveling or a citizen of a country and you have get out info in a crisis but are being blocked; TOR is your exit.  I’ve been to 36 different countries and tested in all countries and it worked great! Oh it’s slow for sure. But if you came from; “Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding” welcome to flashback city home slice.

As side note…man alive TOR can be the Terentatek of the Internet. Be careful messing ‘round with .onion URL extensions in this universe.

What did I miss? Share some of your IT workarounds with the TechWise Guyz community here. Hey it’s kinda like hitting a virtual off limits bar online! Kick back crank up some Daft Punk and twist the top off your fav hack! PROST!!!

Jimmy Ray Purser

Trivia File Transfer Protocol

The phone keys One and Zero do not have numbers because they are “flag” numbers and kept for special uses like emergencies or operator services.

 



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Jimmy Ray Purser

Former Co-Host of TechWiseTV

No Longer at Cisco