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Last week, Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina was announced as a winning city in the US2020 City Competition!  Cisco is a founding corporate partner of US2020, which is dedicated to igniting a movement of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) mentorship across the United States.  My work supporting the US2020 City Competition initiative, on behalf of Cisco in RTP, afforded me the great privilege of being 1 of 4 people from our community who visited the White House to hear this great news.  It was a full day, and one that I will never forget!

Continue reading “Igniting a STEM Movement: A Day at the White House”



Authors

Christina O'Neill

Manager

Cisco Community Relations

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With its fast-growing economy, India faces significant challenges in meeting the energy needs of its population and industry. And given the growth of the renewable energy sector, the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) was established in 1987  to promote, develop, and extend financial assistance for projects involving renewable energy generation, energy efficiency, and conservation. IREDA recognized the need to optimize use of its resources and leverage technology advances to better serve its constituents.

To improve the efficiency of its increasingly complex operations, IREDA sought to replace its aging heterogeneous campus network infrastructure with a scalable, unified solution. Key requirements included superior reliability and security as well as energy efficiency to foster the agency’s values while providing cost savings. There was an immediate benefit in lowering network energy consumption and the network would be the tool to both help ensure the security of confidential information and provide high performance for applications such as video.

How did this renewable energy agency approach deploying a network that would be scalable and power resilient while optimizing network efficiency? Click to read the full blog

 



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nicholasThis blog was written by Nicholas Enna, Director of Enterprise Applications at Teach For All, and originally appeared on Huffington Post ImpactX. Cisco supports Teach For All with donations of telecommunications infrastructure. 

“We are all interested in the future, for that is where we will spend the rest of our lives.” –Plan 9 From Outer Space

I find myself averse to writing predictions of the future as most predictions fail. Take a few minutes to peruse some older covers of magazines on a blog like Paleofuture and you may find yourself chuckling at the image of planes landing on top of skyscrapers and airships shuttling thousands of people lazily from one city to the next one.

Even the posts as late as 1980 are a little cringeworthy now, and many articles written today will seem equally ridiculous to later generations.

A great example is OMNI Magazine’s prediction of 47 careers that would be common in the future, like “space geographer” or “microwave marketer.” Most predictions of the future simply take the present and add 20 to it or reflect the personal prejudices and naive expectations of the predictor.

Yet, as I scroll through these relics of futures that never came, I started to wonder if it really is such a bad idea to take some time and ponder how work and careers would change in the coming decades. Maybe such predictions seem silly, but back in the ’70s, who would have changed a lucrative job manufacturing cars for a career in robotics? They might have, had they seen the articulated robotic arms being sold to General Motors and its competitors. In 1990, when the fledging web was emerging, how many people thought they needed to jump into online security? Today, it is one of the most in-demand jobs.

Continue reading “10 Skills The Workforce of the Future Will Need”



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

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ginaWritten By Gina Nienaber, Marketing Manager, SP Product and Solutions Marketing

This is the first blog out of a series of three covering  “What is the Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) Era and Why Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) Now?”

Those of us who have been around in the industry for a few decades will remember the first arrival of the “big bad wolf” that tried to blow down the service provider’s house. This wolf presented itself in the form of the commoditization of IP services and high traffic growth rates that limited service provider profitability options forcing them to move away from dedicated TDM-based networks that supported a single video, voice, data, or mobile service. Service Providers partnered with Cisco (and others) to build more scalable and lower costs converged IP Next Generation Networks (IP NGNs) and entered the IP NGN era. In doing so, a new wave of innovation and service revenues followed.

Until of course, “the big bad wolf” arrived on the scene again, also known as “exponential traffic growth, especially in mobile video, and this time he brought his friend along for the ride – the Internet of Everything (IoE).  Cisco VNI predicts IP Traffic alone will grow 300 percent to 1.4 zettabytes annually by 2017. Most of you are already experiencing the pains of exponential traffic growth and some of you believe, as we do, the next wave of dramatic Internet growth will come through the confluence of people, process, data, and things — or the IoE! And IoE predictions are off the charts as well.  Cisco estimates that 99.4 percent of physical objects in the world are still unconnected. With only about 10 billion of the 1.5 trillion things currently connected globally, there is vast potential to connect the unconnected via the IoE.

When you combine exponential traffic growth with IoE impact on the horizon what do service providers get?  You guessed it – cost and network complexity are rising at a faster rate than revenue. In order to deal with these challenges, (I would rather call them opportunities), network transformation is not optional, but essential for the next wave of growth and propriety.

This might also be a good time to mention the major innovations in cloud and virtualization technologies such as SDN and NFV are allowing for new agile competitors to enter into the market and are challenging traditional providers for their revenue streams by changing the service delivery game and giving the customer control over their service instantiation with consumption based business models.  If you would like to review a quick snapshot of the challenges providers are facing today see the Cisco EPN At-A-Glance.

Are you convinced we need to move from the IP NGN Era to the EPN Era Yet?  If not keep reading – you will be.

Why Evolved Programmable Network? Continue reading “Cisco Evolved Programmable Network: The Beginning of a New Era in SP Networking”



Authors

Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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Are your Master Builders free to create? Are your Ordinary Builders helping them to execute? And more to the point, are you acting like the evil President Business, hindering innovation, placing talent in silos, and keeping your organization frozen in the past?

If so, you may find an unlikely role model in Emmet Brickowski.

OK, Emmet may be an animated character made of plastic blocks, but don’t dismiss him so easily. If you are a manager looking to ensure your team is the best it can be, you may want to check out Emmet’s starring role in “The LEGO Movie.” I believe there is deep wisdom in what this little character has to say.

One of the key themes of the film is that many organizations adhere too strongly to their legacy traditions. Though such traditions may have served them well in the past, they can also sow stagnation and put a brake on agility and adaptability. This is especially true in the Internet of Everything (IoE) era, as a massive wave of network connectivity and innovation upends organizations, business models, and entire industries. In the process, longstanding assumptions around strategy and success are falling by the wayside.

Emmet lives in a world run by President Business, the head of a successful corporation that fears any change to the status quo. President Business will even resort to supergluing LEGO pieces to keep them in their rightful places. President Business divides the world into two kinds of people: Ordinary Builders and Master Builders. He rewards Ordinary Builders who follow the rules, building from their LEGO Kits; he disapproves of the “anarchic” creativity of the Master Builders, who like to improvise from a pile of blocks, and he is determined to capture all of them.

Continue reading “Lessons from LEGO To Drive “Out-of-the-Box” Thinking”



Authors

Rachael McBrearty

Chief Creative and Group Leader

Cisco Consulting Services

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Ethernet Switches are broadly categorized into two main categories – Modular and Fixed Configuration.

Modular switches, as the name implies, allows you to add expansion modules into the switches as needed, thereby delivering the best flexibility to address changing networks. Examples of expansion modules are application-specific (such as Firewall, Wireless, or Network Analysis), modules for additional interfaces, power supplies, or cooling fans. Cisco Catalyst 4K and 6K are good examples of Modular switches.

Fixed Configuration switches are switches with a fixed number of ports and are typically not expandable. This category is discussed in further detail below. Cisco Catalyst 2K, 3K and the Cisco 300/500 series are good examples of Fixed Configuration switches.

Let me say up front that there are variations to the categories below as switch makers are constantly adding capabilities and evolving the categories, but the broad essence remains the same.

The Fixed configuration switch category is further broken down into:

– Unmanaged Switches

– Smart Switches

– Managed L2 and L3 Switches

Unmanaged Switches:

This category of switch is the most cost effective for deployment scenarios that require only basic layer 2 switching and connectivity. As such, they fit best when you need a few extra ports on your desk, in a lab, in a conference room, or even at home.

With some Unmanaged switches in the market, you can even get capabilities such as cable diagnostics, prioritization of traffic using default QoS settings, Energy savings capabilities using EEE (Energy Efficient Ethernet) and even PoE (Power Over Ethernet). However, as the name implies, these switches generally cannot be modified/managed. You simply plug them in and they require no configuration at all.

Cisco 100 Series switches are good examples of this category.

Smart Switches (also known as Lightly Managed Switches):

This category of switches is the most blurred and fastest changing. The general rule here is that these switches offer certain levels of Management, QoS, Security, etc. but is “lighter” in capabilities and less scalable than the Managed switches. It therefore makes them a cost-effective alternative to Managed switches. As such, Smart switches fit best at the edge of a large network (with Managed Switches being used in the core), as the infrastructure for smaller deployments, or for low complexity networks in general.

The capabilities available for this Smart switch category vary widely. All of these devices have an interface for Management – historically a browser-based interface used to be the only way to configure these devices, though nowadays you can manage some of these devices with CLI and/or SNMP/RMON as well. Regardless, these capabilities are lighter than what you will find in their Managed switch counterparts.  Smart switches tend to have a management interface that is more simplified than what Managed Switches offer.

Smart switches allow you to segment the network into workgroups by creating VLANs, though with a lower number of VLANs and nodes (MAC addresses) than you’d get with a Managed switch.

They also offer some levels of security, such as 802.1x endpoint authentication, and in some cases with limited numbers of ACLs (access control lists), though the levels of control and granularity would not be the same as a Managed switch.

In addition, Smart switches support basic quality-of-service (QoS) that facilitates prioritization of users and applications based on 802.1q/TOS/DSCP, thereby making it quite a versatile solution.

Cisco 200 Series switches are good examples of this category.

Fully Managed L2 and L3 switches:

Managed Switches are designed to deliver the most comprehensive set of features to provide the best application experience, the highest levels of security, the most precise control and management of the network, and offer the greatest scalability in the Fixed Configuration category of Switches. As a result, they are usually deployed as aggregation/access switches in very large networks or as core switches in relatively smaller networks. Managed switches should support both L2 switching and L3 IP routing though you’ll find some with only L2 switching support.

From a Security perspective, Managed switches provide protection of the data plane (User traffic being forwarded), control plane (traffic being communicated between networking devices to ensure user traffic goes to the right destination), and management plane (traffic used to manage the network or device itself). Managed switches also offer network storm control, denial-of-service protection, and much more.

The Access Control List capabilities allows for flexibly dropping, rate limiting, mirroring, or logging of traffic by L2 address, L3 address, TCP/UDP port numbers, Ethernet type, ICMP or TCP flags, etc.

Managed switches are rich in features that enable them to protect themselves and the network from deliberate or unintended Denial of Service attacks.  It includes Dynamic ARP Inspection, IPv4 DHCP snooping, IPv6 First Hop Security with RA Guard, ND Inspection, Neighbor Binding Integrity, and much more.

Additional Security capabilities may include Private VLANs for securing communities of users or device isolation, Secure Management (downloads through SCP, Web-based Authentication, Radius/TACACS AAA, etc), Control Plane Policing (CoPP) for protecting the CPU of the switch, richer support for 802.1x (time-based, Dynamic VLAN Assignment, port/host-based, etc)

From a Scalability perspective, these devices have large table sizes so that you can create large numbers of VLANs (for workgroups), devices (MAC table size), IP routes, and ACL policies for flow-based security/QoS purposes, etc.

For highest network availability and uptime, Managed switches support L3 redundancy using VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol), large numbers of Link Aggregation groups (which is used both for scalability and resiliency), and capabilities for protecting L2 such as Spanning Tree Root Guard and BPDU Guard.

When we talk about QoS and Multicast features, the richness of capabilities goes far beyond what you’d see in a Smart Switch. Here you’d see things such as IGMP and MLD Snooping with Querier functions for optimizing IPv4/v6 multicast traffic in the LAN, TCP Congestion Avoidance, 4 or 8 queues to treat traffic differently by importance, setting/tagging traffic by L2 (802.1p) or L3 (DSCP/TOS), and rate limiting traffic.

In terms of Management, things such as multiple ways to configure (using CLI, Web GUI, SNMP Management application), discovering of neighbor devices in the networks (using CDP, LLDP, Bonjour, etc), and troubleshooting capabilities (such as VLAN and Port Mirroring, Traceroute, Ping, Syslog, Cable Diagnostics, RMON, etc) are all included.

What I highlighted is by no means exhaustive, but gives you a sense of what some of the differences may be between Managed and Smart Switches.

Cisco Catalyst and Cisco 300 Series and 500 Series switches are good examples of this category of products.

Managed Switches can go even further than what I’ve highlighted. For example, there’s even richer support for Dynamic Unicast and Multicast Routing protocols, deeper flow intelligence or macro flow statistics with Netflow/SFlow, non-Stop Forwarding capabilities, MPLS/VRF support, Policy enforcement, and many others.

Now, to take a deeper dive into these switch categories and talk about various options, you can select the switches based on:

– Speed

– Number of ports

– POE versus non-POE

– Stackable versus Standalone

Speed:

You can find Fixed Configuration switches in Fast Ethernet (10/100 Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000 Mbps), Ten Gigabit (10/100/1000/10000 Mbps) and even some 40/100 Gbps speeds. These switches have a number of uplink ports and a number of downlink ports. Downlinks connect to end users – uplinks connect to other Switches or to the network infrastructure. Currently, Gigabit is the most popular interface speed though Fast Ethernet is still widely used, especially in price-sensitive environments. Ten Gigabit has been growing rapidly, especially in the datacenter and, as the cost comes down, it will continue to expand into more network applications. With 10GBase-T Ten Gigabit copper interfaces being integrated into LOM (LAN on the Motherboard) and 10G-Base-T switches becoming available now  (see the new Cisco SG500XG-8F8T 16-port 10-Gigabit switch), building a Storage or Server farm with 10 Gigabit interfaces has never been easier or more cost-effective. 40G/100G is still emerging and will be mainstream in a few years.

Number of ports:

Fixed Configuration Switches typically come in 5, 8, 10, 16, 24, 28, 48, and 52-port configurations. These ports may be a combination of SFP/SFP+ slots for fiber connectivity, but more commonly they are copper ports with RJ-45 connectors on the front, allowing for distances up to 100 meters. With Fiber SFP modules, you can go distances up to 40 kilometers

POE versus non-POE:

Power over Ethernet is a capability that facilitates powering a device (such as an IP phone, IP Surveillance Camera, or Wireless Access Point) over the same cable as the data traffic.  One of the advantages of PoE is the flexibility it provides in allowing you to easily place endpoints anywhere in the business, even places where it might be difficult to run a power outlet. One example is that you can place a Wireless Access Point inside a wall or ceiling.

Switches deliver power according to a few standards – IEEE 802.3af delivers power up to 15.4 Watts on a switch port whereas IEEE 802.3at (also known as POE+) delivers power up to 30 Watts on a switch port. For most endpoints, 802.3af is sufficient but there are devices, such as Video phones or Access Points with multiple radios, which have higher power needs. It’s important to point out that there are other PoE standards currently being developed that will deliver even high levels of power for future applications. Switches have a power budget set aside for running the switch itself, and also an amount of power dedicated for POE endpoints.

To find the switch that is right for you, all you need to do is choose a switch according to your power needs. When connecting to desktops or other types of devices which do not require POE, the non-POE switches are a more cost-effective option.

Stackable versus Standalone:

As the network grows, you will need more switches to provide network connectivity to the growing number of devices in the network. When using Standalone switches, each switch is managed, troubleshot, and configured as an individual entity.

In contrast, Stackable switches provide a way to simplify and increase the availability of the network. Instead of configuring, managing, and troubleshooting eight 48-port switches individually, you can manage all eight like a single unit using a Stackable Switches. With a true Stackable Switch, those eight switches (total 384 ports) function as a single switch – there is a single SNMP/RMON agent, single Spanning Tree domain, single CLI or Web interface – i.e. single management plane. You can also create link aggregation groups spanning across multiple units in the stack, port mirror traffic from one unit in the stack to another, or setup ACLs/QoS spanning all the units. There are valuable operational advantages to be gained by this approach.

Here’s a word of warning. Be careful about products in the market which are sold as “Stackable” when they merely offer a single user interface, or central management interface, for getting to each individual switch unit. This approach is not stackable, but really “clustering”. You still have to configure every feature such as ACLs, QoS, Port mirroring, etc, individually on each switch. Use the following as a proof point – can I create a link aggregation group with one port in one unit of the stack and another port of that group in another unit of the stack? Can I select a port on one unit in the stack and mirror the traffic to a port on another unit of the stack? When I configure an ACL for Security purposes, can I apply that to any port on any unit in the stack? If the answer is “No” to any of these questions, you’re probably not working with a stackable switch.

There are other advantages of True Stacking as well. You can connect the stack members in a ring such that, if a port or cable fails, the stack will automatically route around that failure, many times at microsecond speeds. You can also add or subtract stack members and have it automatically recognized and added into the stack.

Cisco Catalyst 2K-X and 3K or Cisco 500 Series Switches are examples of Switches in this category.

As you can see there’s a multitude of switch options to choose from. So, have a close look at your current deployment and future needs to determine the right switch for your network.



Authors

Ivor Diedricks

Sr. Product Manager - Enterprise Switching

Enterprise Networking Group (ENG)

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Get this.

The average consumer is never more than 3 feet away from their phone. The average smart phone user checks their phone 40 times a day. Mobility has become a necessary part of our lives and will be even more so with the emergence of the Internet of Everything, which will bring together people, processes, data and things. And this is not reflected only in stats that abound around the Internet but also in analysts firms’ research findings.

In a hot-off-the-press report, ACG Research’s Ray Mota notes that  a major paradigm shift is happening. “Although service providers are requesting that vendors extend consumption model of their financing, we are seeing a major CAPEX spending shift from wireline to wireless. Mobile spending continues to rise globally, fueling LTE spending. EPC will continue to be a highly dynamic market for the next several years as vendors and carriers work through network virtualization. We saw a major shift in market shares in 1Q14 because of vendors’ execution and the flexibility of their portfolios.

The market share vendor break down in the ACG report shows Cisco as #1 in Mobile IP Infrastructure including #1 in Packet Core (MPC & EPC)., #1 in Mobile Backhaul, and #1 Mobile IP Core.

This past quarter we gained market share with Continue reading “Great News, Cisco gains market share in Mobility”



Authors

Kelly Ahuja

Senior Vice President

Service Provider Business, Products, and Solutions

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Once a Viking fishing village founded in the 10th century, Copenhagen today stands tall among the world’s most technologically enlightened cities.

Most everyone knows that Denmark’s capital is praised worldwide for its green initiatives, which are obvious from the pure air, clean sidewalks, ever-present bicycles and fresh-water canals, which I’ve enjoyed swimming in over the years.

There’s good reason Copenhagen topped the 2012 Global Green Economy Index and was recently named “The European Green Capital 2014.”

Continue reading “Copenhagen Gets Greener with the Internet of Everything”



Authors

Wim Elfrink

Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions & Chief

Globalisation Officer

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Mobile security is a top concern for IT and business leaders. This blog series with Dimension Data explores how organizational leaders can work together to mitigate concern and implement clearly defined policies and mobility goals. This blog will address the opportunities and risk of secure mobility from the top down. The first blog in this series discussing how concerns outweigh actions when it comes to mobility security can be found here. The second blog in this series highlighting how IT and business leaders can work together to develop secure mobility policies can be found here. The third blog in this series discussing how to close the gap between vision and real-world implementation can be found here.

Throughout this blog series, we’ve discussed several key aspects of implementing secure mobility policies and programs to ensure organizations can reap the benefits of mobility now and in the future. It’s clear that mobility is a top priority for IT and business leaders and most have a clear vision of the role mobility can and will play in their organization. Overall, they see both the risks and the rewards.

That said, responses gathered in the recent Dimension Data Secure Mobility Global Survey point to a gap between that overall vision and the likely real-world outcomes organizations will face – given that a number of crucial initial steps can ultimately save time, reduce costs, and, most importantly, ensure appropriate security controls are in place.

In this post, I’ll highlight the real opportunities and risk regarding mobility and security – and how business leaders can address the disparity between vision and actual deployment now and for years to come.

Understanding the Opportunity and the Real Risk

The threat to an organization’s proprietary information is certainly foremost in the minds of IT and security leaders. Interestingly, 71% of respondents of the recent Dimension Data survey indicated that their business leaders view employee utilization of personal mobile devices as potentially dangerous, costly and not business critical.

IT concerns about secure enterprise mobility risk are many. These include the introduction of malware into the environment from largely unmanaged devices or devices that organizations have little to no control over and the data leakage challenges by allowing users to have various parts of data outside of the network. In addition, many IT leaders ask:

  • “How are we actually going to deploy mobility security?”
  • “How are we going to support the users?”
  • “Will our IT help desk be able to meet the around-the-clock requests that today’s users demand?”

Continue reading “Dimension Data Series #4- The Opportunities and Risk of Secure Mobility from the Top Down”



Authors

Jason Harris

Principal Consultant for Security and Enterprise Mobility for Dimension Data Americas