2014 - Page 131 of 240

June 4, 2014 Leave a Comment

Server Provider Has Never Been Better at Cisco Live!

Written By Igor Dayen, Manager, Service Provider Marketing, Cisco

Cisco Live! 2014 in San Francisco was bigger, better, and bolder than ever this year. There was a record breaking 25,000 registered customers, partners, press and analysts at the event. The Service Provider Program has allowed the attendees to witness firsthand latest innovations and solutions as the service provider booth made its debut on the show floor. Cisco Live! was packed with educational sessions and our booth staffers ran live demonstrations to solutions to provide visual proof points to the material presented during the breakouts. This was also a debut for the Service Provider to have its own booth in the Main Cisco campus. As the 2014 US edition of Cisco Live! in San Francisco came to a close, I wanted to share a few thoughts and links with our readers so that they can tune into some of the great content and photos of the event.

Watch our postcard video that takes a look at activity in the service provider booth at this year’s show!

Like any good story starts, the week for the Service Provider program kicked off with an energizing keynote by David Ward, Kit Beall, and Kelly Ahuja. During the SP Keynote, Kit Beall posed a question once asked by the novelist Victor Hugo: “Will the future ever arrive?” This resonated very well with the theme of the overall program for service providers at Cisco Live. Before the event we had posted an SP community blog where we began exploring the value of SP open network architecture. With the Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) and the Evolved Services Platform (ESP) architectures being the key pillars of SP open network architecture you have more options on how you will architect and build your network so that the applications can be successfully deployed. But is that really enough for the service providers to evolve in the future? Cisco’s answer is agility, lower costs, and new revenue opportunities made achievable with virtualization, programmability, and open standards that come with SP open network architecture. When architected this way, services can be deployed more efficiently, faster and with better SLAs. At Cisco we provide the solution which exactly does that. Overall, during the SP keynote the key message to service .providers was innovation, automation, and virtualization.

Following the three key announcements Continue reading “Server Provider Has Never Been Better at Cisco Live!”

Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

Leave a Comment

It’s all about you: thanks for making Cisco’s Unified Computing System #1

Frank Palumbo

When we talk about Cisco UCS success, we could boast about how, in just five short years, Cisco has earned the #1 position for x86 blade server sales in the Americas. Or, brag on how we achieved 39% revenue growth in a period where the other top five vendors saw flat or declining numbers, according to IDC. We could mention how some in the industry questioned our strategy to enter this market in the first place, in the middle of a worldwide economic slowdown no less. Also, we might remind everyone that others predicted that we wouldn’t last a year.

We could do that, but we won’t. Because we know without a doubt, that the success of Cisco UCS is not all about us. It is about our customers, who continue to choose innovation. Like our customers, we are acutely aware that the data center, including the role of IT, is changing rapidly. Cost pressures, technology changes, and game-changers like cloud computing require a new approach. With our unified data center architecture, products, solutions, and services, we are helping you achieve the business outcomes you need for your organization to grow. We are working with you, over 33,000 strong and growing, to help evolve your data centers using the Cisco Unified Data Center platform and redefine the economics of your IT operations. So you can spend more of your resources on delivering innovation to your business, all while increasing business agility, reducing CapEx and OpEx, and simplifying your operations.

It’s also about Cisco data center partners, because we know that it takes an ecosystem to be successful. Driving 80% of all Cisco UCS sales, channel partners are fueling this rapid growth and capturing emerging opportunities including cloud, big data, enterprise applications, and desktop virtualization. Early on, our partners recognized the value of UCS and embraced it. Their training, infrastructure, and other investments have been a huge contributor to UCS traction in the marketplace. The results are an expanded data center practice and value delivered to customers. Cisco data center partners, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Not long ago, Paul Perez predicted this day would come. His bold “sooner than you think” statement has come to pass, well, sooner than we thought. Frankly, we’re not too surprised. But we are pleased, and humbled, and determined to keep pushing forward with data center innovation such as Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure.

But most of all, we thank you.

Frank Palumbo

Senior Vice President

Global Data Center Sales

1 Comment

What do predictions about 5G mean for the Future of Mobility?

Stuart Taylor

With the recent exponential growth of mobile devices, it is hard not to look ahead for the next big thing that will transform technology as we know it.

One current hot topic is 5G. While most industry experts agree it is a ways off, there are obvious reasons for excitement — including how it will impact the future of mobility, the Internet of Things, and ultimately the Internet of Everything.

If 5G is all that it’s speculated to be, the mobility landscape will be in for a dramatic change , especially as businesses and organizations embrace all that 5G stands to offer such as ultra-fast network speeds and an increase in capacity.

However, while the industry grapples with understanding “just what is 5G” many experts, such as Continue reading “What do predictions about 5G mean for the Future of Mobility?”

Stuart Taylor

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

Leave a Comment

Cisco UCS is #1 in Integrated Infrastructure

Jim McHugh

What is integrated infrastructure? Major analysts firms differ slightly on the taxonomy and makeup of the various integrated systems that comprise this market segment. However, they do agree that these systems include a combination of servers, networking, storage systems, and management. Cisco realized that bringing together industry and market leading technologies would help accelerate IT infrastructure deployment, lower design costs, simplify management, and enable high levels of utilization. Integrated infrastructures offer the foundation for private cloud deployments, virtual desktop solutions, and enterprise applications.

Everyone agrees that the integrated infrastructure market is booming and that Cisco is a core vendor in this market segment with leading integrated infrastructures built on top of Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus. IDC believes this market is going to grow at greater than 30% for the next few years to more than $14B in 2017. Today, Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus participate in the top three Integrated Infrastructures –FlexPod Solutions with NetApp, Vblock Systems with VCE, and EMC VSPEX. FlexPod and Vblock have captured more than 42% of the market and utilize Cisco UCS and Nexus exclusively.

In addition, Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Select and Nimble Storage SmartStack also chose to build integrated infrastructure solutions with Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus switches. If you add up the numbers from IDC, Cisco participates in integrated infrastructures that account for roughly 69% of the market from a revenue perspective. Very impressive!

It is also impressive that just five years ago we announced Cisco UCS and it is now the #1 provider of x86 Blade Servers in the Americas and #2 World Wide (according to the most recent IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker – May 2014). Cisco UCS has delivered some ground breaking technology. The policy-based Service Profiles and Cisco SingleConnect technology changed how we connected, managed, and provisioned servers. Cisco continues to drive this strategy forward with Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), offering comprehensive control of a much broader set of data center infrastructure that is oriented to the application environment. FlexPod, Vblock Systems, and Cisco solutions for EMC VSPEX plan to integrate Cisco ACI with Cisco UCS Director to accelerate application delivery and streamline operations. Both NetApp and VCE recently announced they will also integrate Cisco’s Intercloud Fabric with FlexPod and Vblock Systems, enabling the management of cloud-enabled workloads across heterogeneous environments.

This rapid rate of customer adoption for Cisco UCS and integrated infrastructures enabled by Cisco is evidence that real innovation can deliver IT infrastructure that transforms the data center. For more information on integrated infrastructures enabled by Cisco please check out this new white paper.

Customers Choose Innovation: Cisco UCS is the #1 Blade Server in the Americas from Cisco Data Center

Jim McHugh

Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Unified Computing Systems

Leave a Comment

Active Archiving with Big Data

Bob Eve

Historical data is now an essential tool for businesses as they struggle to meet increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, manage risk and perform predictive analytics that help improve business outcomes. While recent data is readily accessible in operational systems and some summarized historical data available in the data warehouse, the traditional practice of archiving older, detail-level data on tape makes analysis of that data challenging, if not impossible.

Active Archiving Uses Hadoop Instead of Tape

What if the historical data on tape was loaded into a similar low cost, yet accessible, storage option, such as Hadoop? And then data virtualization applied to access and combine this data along with the operational and data warehouse data, in essence intelligently partitioning data access across hot, warm and cold storage options. Would it work?

Yes it would! And in fact does every day at one of our largest global banking customers. Here’s how:

Adding Historical Data Reduces Risk

The bank uses complex analytics to measure risk exposure in their fixed income trading business by industry, region, credit rating and other parameters. To reduce risk, while making more profitable credit and bond derivative trading decisions, the bank wanted to identify risk trends using five years of fixed income market data rather than the one month (400 million records) they currently stored on line. This longer time frame would allow them to better evaluate trends, and use that information to build a solid foundation for smarter, lower-risk trading decisions.

As a first step, the bank installed Hadoop and loaded five years of historical data that had previously been archived using tape. Next they installed Cisco Data Virtualization to integrate the data sets, providing a common SQL access approach that made it easy for the analysts to integrate the data. Third the analysts extended their risk management analytics to cover five years. Up and running in just a few months, the bank was able to use this long term data to better manage fixed income trading risk.

To learn more about Cisco Data Virtualization, check out our Data Virtualization Video Portal.

Bob Eve

No Longer with Cisco

1 Comment

Measurable Efficiencies with FlexPod and Cisco UCS Director

Joann Starke

Data center strategy is a critical part of business strategy. In fact, the ways and means of IT deployment make all the difference between an efficient, successful organization and an ineffective one. Therefore, to align and adapt quickly to the needs of business, IT is changing the delivery mechanisms of infrastructure resources. Part of the change is a shift towards integrated solutions.

In fact, integrated solutions such as FlexPod, account for more than 50% of today’s data center spend. They increase hardware utilization while delivering measurable efficiencies. FlexPod is a single infrastructure solution that contains Cisco UCS, Nexus fabric and NetApp cluster Data ONTAP storage. It delivers flexibility and lets you command and control the growth of your data center resources. FlexPod benefits are clear–but to gain the full potential of all of the inherent benefits IT organizations are doing more.

Enter infrastructure automation. Data centers everywhere are in the midst of a sea change as the benefits and efficiencies of automation, across hardware and human resources, are becoming increasingly apparent.

Cisco UCS Director automates your end-to-end IT processes across your FlexPod infrastructure within minutes. It abstracts the complexity of individual devices, hypervisors and virtual machines into a single management console allowing you to manage all of your FlexPods, even geographically dispersed, as a single system.

Watch this video and see how Cisco UCS Director and FlexPod can increase the efficiency of your data center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KubD0Fp_Qfg&feature=youtu.be Continue reading “Measurable Efficiencies with FlexPod and Cisco UCS Director”

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

4 Comments

Customers choose innovation : Cisco UCS is the # 1 blade server in the Americas

Paul Perez

Cisco’s First Trifecta

This week IDC released the calendar 1Q14 server market share tracker report, which is starting to generate press given the news that Cisco UCS has achieved the #1 x86 blade server revenue market share position in the US, in North America and in the Americas – a “triple crown” right before the Belmont Stakes 🙂

We are understandably very proud of this achievement, and we’re taking time to celebrate. It was fun calling John Chambers to share the news, and to remind him that the team delivered on our commitment – to become #1 in blades in the US in 2014, and use that as the launchpad for our #1 world-wide campaign.

At the same time, it’s a humbling experience. We can argue about the meaning of market share numbers. They can be viewed as an indicator of momentum, they can be viewed as ephemeral, so what really is the meaning of being #1?

My interpretation is simple: Customers have a vote, and the market share numbers are an indication of the huge trust customers are placing on Cisco, not just on UCS. In 5 short years we’ve accumulated over 33,000 customers world-wide, including over 75% of Fortune 500 companies. Contrary to competitors’ predictons, UCS is not a flash in the pan. It’s a reflection of Cisco’s ability to innovate in a way that drives tangible business outcomes for our customers. We struck a resonant cord when you consider innovations such as:

Architectural: Cisco delivered the first new innovation in x86 servers in over 10 years by inventing a new category, Fabric Computing, that proved ideal for server virtualization and private clouds.
Business Model: In addition to significant organic R&D investments, Cisco leveraged industry R&D much better than any of our peers. Whether they be infrastructure, operating system, applications, middleware or selling partners, we created an ecosystem that is fair, flexible and scalable. We created a business platform, not a technology platform.
Customer experience: Beyond UCS technology advantages, customers choose Cisco because of our commitment to customer relationships: our sales team’s demonstrated capability to understand our customers’ business and proactively propose transformational opportunites, and our support teams’ utter commitment to protecting business operations when issues inevitably occur.

As we set our sights on being #1 WW, I’d like to surprise readers by actually congratulating HP on being #1 WW; they’ve had the longest run at this coveted spot in the industry. We aim to capture this spot, and to hold it for longer, which we believe is eminently achievable given we’ve achieved #2 WW by focusing on a subset of all available use cases and market segments. We have many opportunities, all of them well-funded and in execution, to drive expansion – new products, new business capabilities, more market coveraged, enhanced manufacturing, delivery and support.

So in essence, rather than admiring our recent #1 win in the Americas, we choose to view this as a call to arms, a rallying cry to accelerate our drive to #1 WW. Velociraptors unbound!

Lastly, a big THANK YOU to our customers, our partners and our entire value chain teams to demonstrate Cisco is serious about setting the state of the art in computing. And I say this deliberately, because we are not in the server business. We are in the computing business, which is the business of optimizing application environments for performance and total cost of ownership – what our customers want.

Paul Perez

Senior Vice President, General Manager

Chief Technology Officer, Data Center Group

Leave a Comment

Fast IT Workshop #2 – Roadmap to Fast IT

Jim Grubb

As business leaders navigate an increasingly complex world of connections, they need IT to provide a programmable infrastructure that can dynamically respond to their needs. This four-part blog series explores how responsive infrastructure helps IT leaders succeed. This post will discuss what IT leaders can do now to adopt a roadmap to Fast IT.

To read the first post in this series by Colin Kincaid which introduces Fast IT, a new model for IT, click here. To read the third post in this series by Doug Webster which highlights how service providers specifically stand to benefit from Fast IT, click here. To read the fourth and final post in this series by Jeff Reed which explores how a Fast IT model can mitigate infrastructure challenges, click here.

The old way of doing things won’t work anymore for us IT professionals. The “application economy” and explosion of connected devices have increased the complexity of IT to such levels that throwing bodies at the problems won’t solve them anymore. The new Fast IT model we discussed in previous blogs enables IT departments to shift focus from spending too much time keeping the lights on to capturing the value of today’s connections and preparing for the future.

Here is an example of the CapEx and OpEx savings our own Cisco IT has achieved by following a Fast IT model.

Like any strategic initiative, the transition to a Fast IT model requires careful planning and change management. In particular, organizations need to develop a plan that encompasses people, organizational processes and technologies. Once this foundational plan is in place, CIOs are then ready to begin the steps of preparing their business for Fast IT and building an organization focused on service delivery.

To assist with this process, we’ve created a four-step roadmap. Here’s a closer look at each step:

Continue reading “Fast IT Workshop #2 – Roadmap to Fast IT”

Authors

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

Authors

Senior Vice President

Global Data Center Sales

Authors

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

Authors

Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Unified Computing Systems

Authors

Global Director

Partner Strategy and Programs

Active Archiving Uses Hadoop Instead of Tape

Adding Historical Data Reduces Risk

To learn more about Cisco Data Virtualization, check out our Data Virtualization Video Portal.

Authors

No Longer with Cisco

Authors

No Longer with Cisco

Authors

Senior Vice President, General Manager

Chief Technology Officer, Data Center Group

Authors

Chief Technology Evangelist

Cisco Customer Experience Center

CONNECT WITH US