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Operational process and governance, as I discussed last month, is “Domain 10” in the Cisco Domain Ten(SM) model for data center transformation.  It’s so important in my opinion, and so often disregarded or de-prioritised when planning and executing data center transformation, that I’ll cover it twice!

Domain Ten: Process and Governance aka Operations Management
Domain Ten: Process and Governance aka Operations Management

Last time, I discussed some of the “Process and Governance” questions that may- indeed should – be on your mind when planning data center changes.   While you may think of Cisco Services as primarily an architecture and design specialist organization, I hope my Cisco Domain Ten blogs series has shown you we can help you with a lot more than infrastructure design.

In fact, recently, we revised our data center operations management services that we offer to help customers like you accelerate operational success with the new technologies and solutions that they are deploying.  We’ve consolidated the best of our service provider and enterprise operations management service offerings, including ITIL focus, together with our internal experience in running “Cisco on Cisco” – resulting in what we now call Cisco Data Center Services for Operations Enablement, illustrated below.

Continue reading “Cisco Domain Ten: Domain 10: Process and Governance – Part (b)”



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

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Open MPI recently revamped its entire run-time parameter system (a.k.a., “MCA parameter system”) as part of its implementation effort for the “MPI_T” interface from MPI-3.

The MPI_T interface is a standardized interface designed for MPI tools, but can be used by regular MPI application programs, too.

Specifically, MPI_T provides programatic access to two types of MPI implementation data:

  1. Control variables: used to control the behavior of an MPI implementation
  2. Performance variables: provide access to internal MPI implementation performance metrics

Continue reading “Open MPI and the MPI-3 MPI_T interface”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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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 content you may have missed along the way. Let’s have it.

Off The Top

We’re continuing to evolve our leadership team inside the Worldwide Partner Organization (WWPO), and as you hopefully saw earlier today, we’re once again moving a familiar face into a new role. Andrew Sage, well-known for his work with Small Business channels and most recently as VP, Worldwide Partner Led, is taking over as our new VP, Americas Distribution.

“Andrew will be responsible for all aspects of sales, marketing, operations and logistics for the Americas Distribution Channel, which represents over $6.3 billion in revenue and is a cornerstone of our Partner-Led sales strategy,” wrote Julie Hens, VP, Worldwide Distribution and Wendy Bahr, SVP, Americas Partner Organization, on the Channels blog Friday.

Send congratulations to Andrew, and read on for all of this week’s hot topics.  Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – July 12, 2013”



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I am still in awe at the incredible WorldSkills event that took place in Leipzig, Germany last week. It was truly amazing to see thousands of the most talented youth from around the world compete for the top title in their skill.

World Skills brings top international trainees age 23 and younger to compete for medals in 46 official disciplines — from cooking to IT networking.

The closing ceremony brought tears of joy and shouts of excitement as the names of each competition winner were unveiled, bringing to an end the intense week in Germany. Seeing the sheer joy on the winner’s faces was emotional and an experience I will never forget.

Skill #39 medal winners Takuya Nishide, Jason Soh, and  Hui-zhong Liu
Skill #39 medal winners Takuya Nishide, Jason Soh, and Hui-zhong Liu. Photo courtesy WorldSkills.

Continue reading “NetAcad Students Win 2 of 3 Medals in WorldSkills Competition for Networking Administration”



Authors

Julie Chrysler

Program Manager

Cisco Networking Academy

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At Cisco Live in Orlando two weeks ago we announced some very exciting news about the evolution of the Cisco Unified Fabric portfolio. With the announcement of Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA) on June 26th, we are changing the game on how fabrics are managed, provisioned, and automated. In the Techwise TV video interview below with Jimmy Ray Purser and Mauricio Arregoces they discuss some more details on how this is accomplished. Do yourself a favor and watch and learn! Stay tuned for more posts on DFA.



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Last fall, I blogged about No SSID Outage or Access Point Stateful Switchover introduced with the AireOS 7.3 release whereby if your wireless LAN Controller fails due to some hardware failure, thousands of Access Points fail over sub-second to the standby controller! This is possible due to continuous synchronization of CAPWAP states, Configuration Changes, Radio Channel and Power, Roaming Keys and Access Point licenses between the two Controllers. This means even if the administrator changes the configuration, channel plans or the clients roam and the primary controller fails; the Access Points will simply fail over in a stateful fashion to the secondary. In this blog, I will share details on the upcoming enhancements to High Availabilty with the 7.5 release.

In the upcoming AireOS 7.5 release, we take High Availability to the next level with two critical enhancements.

1. Today, after Access Points fail over from the primary to the standby controller, each client tries to re-authenticate and the standby controller then checks against its CCKM database whether the client has already authenticated. At the rate of several tens of authentications per second, it can take anywhere from zero to a few hundred seconds for the tens of thousands of clients that are connected to a controller to re-authenticate. The client stateful essentially eliminates this downtime with sub-second failover. Thus the total downtime that any user running a voice-call or Citrix session experiences is 2-3 seconds that the application requires to reconnect.

sso1 Continue reading “Wireless Controller Redundancy with No Client Reauthentication Needed”



Authors

Jeevan Patil

Director, Product Management

Wireless Network

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Last month I wrote about the Connected Mobile Experiences deployment in Nice. One of the most interesting things I saw at the iCity launch in Nice was a real cool application that can leverage the power of Cisco’s Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution to deliver very unique and exciting capabilities.

Imagine visiting a city and being able to leave your friends digital messages that only they can read when they get to a specific location. Or walking into a new area and getting localized information right then about a specific event. Or customizing signage in whatever language in native to the visitor. Imagine being able to create your own sticky note and making it public or private anytime anyplace electronically.

mandarine-translated-trimmed

All of these things are just some of the possibilities that are now made available using ‘digital graffiti’ from a small startup in the South of France called Geekgaps.

Continue reading “More on Cisco’s Connected Mobile Experiences in Nice, France”



Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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A couple weeks ago, we wrapped up a very successful Cisco Live event in Orlando for more than 20,000 attendees. During the conference, we announced a new name for our software product formerly known as Cisco Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC).

The new name for VNMC is Cisco Prime Network Services Controller – and in the video interview below, I highlighted some of our new innovations with this product.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoEXeE7fa6A

Over the last couple of years, Cisco Prime Network Service Controller (Prime NSC) has developed into Cisco’s primary management platform for Layer 4 through 7 network services deployment in a cloud or virtualized environment. Today the software supports multiple different use cases for network services, with several hundred customers worldwide.

Cisco Prime Network Services Controller is the control point and management software for the InterCloud solution – providing VM workload mobility between a private and public cloud while retaining the same IP address and Layer 2 connectivity. As outlined in a recent blog post by my colleague Gary Kinghorn, our new Nexus 1000V InterCloud solution for hybrid cloud was a big hit at Cisco Live.  During the InterCloud demonstration at Cisco Live, we showed how this Cisco-created technology allows enterprise organizations to extend their Layer 2 network to public clouds like Amazon Web Services.

The screenshots below illustrate how InterCloud enables the secure migration of a VM to a public cloud environment:

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Screen Shot 2013-07-12 at 10.37.27 AM

At Cisco Live, we also announced our new fabric path technology called Cisco Dynamic Fabric Automation (DFA). This new Unified Fabric technology enables simplified network automation and provisioning for both physical server and VM deployments. In the DFA architecture, Cisco Prime Network Services Controller is responsible for managing network services insertion – including firewalls and load balancers – when provisioning or moving VMs.

Continue reading “Highlights: Cisco Prime Network Services Controller at Cisco Live Orlando”



Authors

Dedi Shindler

Product Manager

Cisco Prime Network Services Controller

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This is my third blog under the  series of Internet of Everything (IoE) Security having written the Introduction, and having proposed proposed an architectural view.

To address the highly diverse IoE environment and the related security challenges, a flexible security framework is required.

Our framework is comprised of three generalized components:

  1. Authentication
  2. Authorization and Access Control
  3. Network Enforced Policy

Surrounding all three components, we specify a fourth, Secure Intelligence Operations including Visibility and Control.

cisco_framework-conceptThe components are summarized below: Continue reading “Internet of Everything (IoE) Secure Framework”



Authors

Monique Morrow

CTO-Evangelist

New Frontiers Development and Engineering