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CiscoLiveCisco hosted our first Networkers customer event, now Ciscolive!, 25 years ago.  Our first event was small with around 200 attendees focused on multiprotocal routing technologies.  This year more than 25,000 Cisco customers, partners, press, and analysts attended live in San Francisco, with over 200,000 participating online  with topics ranging from Intercloud, Collaboration, Security, and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to Connected Cities with Smart Parking, Traffic Management and  Public Safety, Connected Transportation, and Connected Government driving mission success to protect, educate, and serve.

I attended my first Cisco Networkers event 20 years ago in San Francisco and have worked on many exciting initiatives during my career the past 2 decades.  The role of networking technology as a platform for the Internet of Everything continues to evolve and accelerate more quickly being adopted and deployed in countries and communities around the world.

The week kicked off with keynotes and demonstrations highlighting the advances in technology as well as the potential for transformation in business and public sector.

KeynoteHighlights included:

Continue reading “Ciscolive! 25 Years of Networkers”



Authors

Kacey Carpenter

Senior Manager

Global Government and Public Sector Marketing

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dan-kurschnerWritten By Dan Kurschner, Senior Manager SP Mobility Marketing

Over the past decades, Mobility has advanced from a mere curiosity (remember those “brick” phones?), to a convenience and today being an indispensable part of our everyday lives.  Businesses are leveraging the internet and the cloud to deliver new services and capabilities – via the mobile network.   While we can access the internet and cloud-based services from almost anywhere, most people do so with barely a thought of the complexities it takes to deliver this ubiquitously connected experience.

Mobile service providers have long been building and upgrading their networks to meet growing demand for capacity and capabilities to stay competitive.   Recently, a new type of competitor has emerged to threaten Continue reading “The Evolution of the Mobile Service Provider – A Five-Stage Strategy”



Authors

Keith Day

Marketing Director

Service Provider Mobility Business

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There are roughly 10,000 firefighters in Los Angeles County who are responsible for the lives of 9.8 million residents. Getting the proper training for all of the fire departments in the county is of the utmost importance in order to maintain a safe community.

Training difficulties

Mandatory classes for all L.A. County firefighters are held annually at one location to maximize the instructors’ time. The problem with this approach is that firefighters are spending several hours outside of their jurisdiction to attend the classes, which affects response times. To adequately staff stations during training, fire departments spend excess dollars for travel and replacement firefighters.

So, they began searching for a way to save money and enhance firefighter training programs during a period of government budget constraints. Shortly after, the Los Angeles Area Fire Chiefs Association (LAAFCA) received grant funding from the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) Program to help to support their high-threat, high-density communities.

Virtual technology for enhanced training sessions

The LAAFCA decided to use the grant to invest in telepresence, or video conferencing, technology to help them meet their financial and training goals. Telepresence was scalable and could be manipulated to fit the needs of the different-sized fire departments in the county.

With HD cameras, microphones, speakers, and lighting, the video systems would allow one highly-qualified instructor to conduct trainings from one location to multiple departments throughout the county in real time.

Since the integration of telepresence, L.A. fire departments have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in training and travel costs, provided multiple virtual training sessions with the same level of high-quality emergency support, recorded previous course lectures for replay at any time, and improved firefighter response time.

“If there is a major emergency in the region, all of the county’s firefighters can respond with the same level of high-quality emergency support. Video conferencing offers these benefits to the trainees in the most efficient way possible.” – Christopher Donovan, Fire Chief at Monrovia Fire Department, California.

If you would like to learn more, read the full case study, and let us know how technology is helping your local first responders.

We also invite you to join our upcoming live webcast on June 5 – our industry experts will cover everything you need to know to create a unified, interoperable public safety IT environment. Register Now

More to come! Be sure to check in for all our upcoming Friday blogs on the latest trends, challenges and technologies impacting public safety. Follow the hashtag #CiscoPublicSafety and @CiscoStateLocal and @CiscoGovt on Twitter for updates, and visit the Cisco Public Safety site for more information on solutions.

 



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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We have been clear that we have a distinct approach to Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), specifically the unique way in which we leverage the compute and storage capabilities of the public cloud. Doing so enables us to do a great number of things to help customers more effectively fight malware, particularly when compared to traditional, point-in-time anti-malware systems of the past 20 years.

Continue reading “Threading the Needle on Privacy and Malware Protection”



Authors

CP Morey

Senior Director, Product Marketing

Security Product and Solutions Marketing

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Note: This is the second of a three-part series on Next Generation Data Center Design with MDS 9700; learn how customers can deploy scalable SAN networks that allow them to Scale Up or Scale Out in a non disruptive way.  Part 1 | Part 3 ]

EMC World was wonderful. It was gratifying to meet industry professionals,  listen in on great presentations and watch the demos for key business enabling technologies that Cisco, EMC and others have brought to fruition.  Its fascinating to see the transition of DC from cost center to a strategic business driver . The same repeated all over again at Cisco Live. More than 25000 attendees, hundreds of demos and sessions. Lot of  interesting customer meetings and MDS continues to resonate. We are excited about the MDS hardware that was on the display on show floor and interesting Multiprotocol demo and a lot of interesting SAN sessions.

Outside these we recently did a webinar on how Cisco MDS 9710 is enabling High Performance DC design with customer case studies. You can listen to that here.

Three Pillars of ReliabilitySo let’s continue our discussion. There is no doubt when it comes to High Performance SAN switches there is no comparable to Cisco MDS 9710. Another component that is paramount to a good data center design is high availability. Massive virtualization, DC consolidation and ability to deploy more and more applications on powerful multi core CPUs has increased the risk profile within DC. These DC trends requires renewed focus on availability. MDS 9710 is leading the innovation there again. Hardware design and architecture has to guarantee high availability. At the same time, it’s not just about hardware but it’s a holistic approach with hardware, software, management and right architecture. Let me give you some just few examples of the first three pillars for high reliability and availability.

 

Reliability examples in MDS

 

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MDS 9710 is the only director in the industry that provides Hardware Redundancy on all critical components of the switch, including fabric cards. Cisco Director Switches provide not only CRC checks but ability to drop corrupted frames. Without that ability network infrastructure exposes the end devices to the corrupted frames. Having ability to drop the CRC frames and quickly isolate the failing links outside as well as inside of the director provides Data Integrity and fault resiliency. VSAN allows fault isolation, Port Channel provides smaller failure domains, DCNM provides rich feature set for higher availability and redundancy. All of these are but a subset of examples which provides high resiliency and reliability.

 

Weakest link

 

We are proud of the 9500 family and strong foundation for reliability and availability that we stand on. We have taken that to a completely new level with 9710. For any design within Data center high availability  has to go hand in hand with consistent performance. One without the other doesn’t make sense. Right design and architecture with DC as is important as components that power the connectivity. As an example Cisco recommend customers to distribute the ISL ports of an Port Channel across multiple line cards and multiple ASICs. This spreads the failure domain such that any ASIC  or even line card failures will not impact the port channel connectivity between switches and no need to reinitiate all the hosts logins. You can see white paper on Next generation Cisco MDS here. At part of writing this white paper ESG tested the Fabric Card redundancy (Page 9) in addition to other features of the platform. Remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

 

Geschäftsmann hat Wut, Frust und Ärger im Büro

 

The most important aspect for all of this is for customer is to be educated.

Ask the right questions. Have in depth discussions to achieve higher availability and consistent performance. Most importantly selecting the right equipment, right architecture and best practices means no surprises.

We will continue our discussion for the Flexibility aspect of MDS 9710.

 

 

-We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit (Aristotle)

 



Authors

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

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“Follow your passion. You will shine when you truly love what you are doing.”

“Finish something, whether it is a degree or a certification. Nobody can ever take that away from you.”

“Be prepared and keep learning. When an opportunity comes you’ll be ready.”

This was just some of the advice and knowledge several hundred college students received from Cisco professionals during the first-ever Student Network Day at the Cisco Live customer education event in San Francisco today.

The event was designed to help students from the San Francisco Bay Area learn about technology trends and career options, and how technology skills can differentiate them no matter what career they choose. Some of the students take courses through Cisco Networking Academy, which trains people to design, build, maintain, and secure computer networks in partnership with community colleges, universities, and other organizations.

The day before her graduation from San Jose State University, Ellen Song attended Student Network Day at Cisco Live to learn more about the technology sector as a potential career path.
The day before her graduation from San Jose State University, Ellen Song attended Student Network Day at Cisco Live to learn more about the technology sector as a potential career path.

Continue reading “Cisco to Students: Technology Skills Can Set You Apart”



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

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The news of high-profile targeted data center attacks has dominated security news recently. But data center attacks are even more prevalent than those headlines suggest. In fact, a survey conducted last summer by Network World suggests that 67 percent of data center administrators experienced downtime due to malware and related attacks in the previous 12 months.

A key challenge is that many of today’s security solutions are simply not designed for the data center, with limitations in both provisioning and performance. The situation will likely get worse before it gets better as data center traffic grows exponentially and data centers migrate from physical, to virtual, to next-generation environments like Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Application Centric Infrastructures (ACI).

Continue reading “Control Without Compromise Through Superior Data Center Protection”



Authors

Bill McGee

No Longer with Cisco

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Did you know that by 2018, there will be in excess of $600 Billion dollars of revenue opportunities in cloud, mobile and video?

Do you want to know the average cost per GB to deliver service over a Mobile IP network?

Do you want to know the forecast of how much would it cost per GB to deliver video services ?

ciscolive

With Cisco Monetization and Optimization Index ( MOI)  you can get answers to many such questions..

The Internet of Everything is driving change and opportunity for service providers.  Our Visual Networking Index Continue reading “Cisco Monetization and Optimization Index ( MOI) Measures and delivers Business Architectures for Service Providers”



Authors

Sanjeev Mervana

Vice President of Product Management

Emerging Technologies & Incubation

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About ten years ago, Courtney Church was studying to be a personal trainer. Then she realized that “people didn’t want to work out, but they needed their computers fixed.” So she did a 180 on her career, spent 8 years with the Best Buy Geek Squad, then enrolled in a Cisco Networking Academy course at East Carolina State University in Greenville, North Carolina.

“I fell in love with it the first day,” Courtney says of Networking Academy. “I’ve always had a passion for figuring out how computers and technology work.”

This week, Courtney joined 25 other Networking Academy students from the United States and Canada at Cisco Live – our annual customer and partner education event – to help a team of Cisco engineers maintain the massive computer network that supports more than 20,000 conference attendees.

Cisco Networking Academy student Courtney Church uses a rare break at Cisco Live to catch up on homework.
Cisco Networking Academy student Courtney Church uses a rare break at Cisco Live to catch up on homework.

Continue reading “Networking Academy Students Get Hands-On at Cisco Live”



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office