2014 - Page 154 of 240

May 7, 2014 Leave a Comment

How Cisco IT Solved Its Internal Cloud Dilemma

Is your organization looking to build a cloud?

You’ll want to learn how Cisco’s John Manville leveraged an internal, private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud to drive business value.

View John Manville's Cloud Insights Video Podcast — View John Manville’s Cloud Insights Video Podcast

John Manville is responsible for Cisco’s Global IT infrastructure – which includes the data centers, networks, platforms and more. Overall, John’s role is to implement Fast IT, which is really about being adaptable and responsive to business needs.

What technology helps drive this responsiveness and adaptability? “There are many solutions that can help, but if I had to sum it up in one word, that word is cloud” replied John .

Cisco uses internal cloud technology for several important business imperatives. Through the cloud, we are balancing internal IT workloads and providing our engineering team the tools needed for OS development. We are also using the internal cloud for external capabilities. For example, Cisco Smart Services uses our internal cloud to offer services to external customers.

Recently, John had the chance to participate in a new Cloud Insights Video Podcast to discuss the challenges his team faced prior to cloud implementation. Like most IT teams, they were challenged by speed of delivery of business capabilities, driving Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) down and completing maintenance on the underlying infrastructure with minimal impact on the business users or applications they need on a daily basis.

To offset these challenges, his team developed and deployed CITEIS (Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services), an internal, private, infrastructure-as-a-service cloud. CITEIS started off as a way to provision virtual machines, but the team quickly realized that it wasn’t enough so they added on more middleware and database capabilities . Now, it’s a rich service that John’s team offers to their clients.

Continue reading “How Cisco IT Solved Its Internal Cloud Dilemma”

Didier Rombaut

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Jumping the Curve: The Simmons Leadership Conference

Parvesh Sethi

I recently attended the annual Leadership Conference, sponsored by Simmons College, considered to be the world’s premier professional development event for women. This year’s theme was “Jumping the Curve,” stepping away from the familiar and stepping up to the unknown.

While I have been engaged with the conference for the past several years, I find each year’s experience to be something special and I continue to be humbled and inspired by the journeys of many of the participants. I wanted to share some of the ideas that stuck with me. The following advice may not be new, but I find it worth repeating – and relevant to women and men.

Don’t be afraid to take risks: With every new endeavor, you’ll gain new experiences and expand your network. Along the way, you’re likely to gain new sponsors and potential advocates.
Invest in networking: Stay connected with your professional and personal contacts. And when you connect and collaborate, if you serve as mentor or mentee, be sure to be clear on objectives to foster a successful relationship.
Dare to compete: Be confident in your abilities, and don’t be afraid to step into the ring. Keynote speaker Hilary Clinton addressed this keenly, noting that male colleagues are more likely to raise their hands regardless of qualifications.
Be patient and adapt quickly: The very funny and talented Rita Moreno spoke from experience as a successful entertainer who overcame years of struggle against Hollywood typecasting. She reminded us that success rarely comes overnight—there are many struggles to overcome, and we must be flexible to succeed.
Don’t just judge; act with purpose: We all harbor some unconscious bias toward others, and that can affect our actions. Instead of judging, listen actively and take action on what you can control and change. As Gandhi once said, “Be careful of your thoughts, for they become your words. Be careful of your words, for they become your actions. Be careful of your actions, for they become your legacy.”

These points of advice can serve us well if we put them into practice, but just how do we do that?
Please take a moment to share your strategies for jumping the curve in the comments section, or continue the discussion on Twitter.

Learn more about Cisco Careers and Cisco’s Inclusion and Diversity program.

Parvesh Sethi

Senior Vice President, Advanced Services, Cisco

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Cisco is a Premier Sponsor at OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014

Amy Cheng

The Spring OpenStack Summit will be held in Atlanta, May 12-16, 2014. The Summit will take place over five days, Monday – Friday, at the Georgia World Congress Center located in downtown Atlanta.

Cisco is again a Premier Sponsor and our presence at the event continues to grow. We have fifteen speaking sessions and four demos. We’ll also have product and solution experts available to share our latest developments with Cisco UCS, OpenStack, virtual networking, and Dynamic Fabric Automation at the Expo Hall.

As I mentioned earlier, Cisco is leading or participating in fifteen speaking sessions that highlight our interoperability and commitment to open source technologies. We have four sessions on Monday, three on Tuesday, four on Wednesday, and four on Thursday. The schedule for our breakout sessions is listed below:

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Amy Cheng

Marketing Manager

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Powering the New Citrix Mobile Workspace – built on Cisco UCS

Tony Paikeday

Did you catch the news from Cisco and Citrix yesterday? Here at Citrix Synergy, we announced the new Cisco Mobile Workspace Solution with Citrix. This new jointly integrated solution brings together best of breed technologies from both companies to deliver a pervasively accessible end user workspace – One that can be delivered on any device, anywhere, seamlessly and securely integrated with the applications and productivity suite necessary for workers to be productive.

Central to this solution are the following tenets of the new mobile workspace:

Supporting any device, any OS
Maintaining secure access to the corporate network
Facilitating rapid expansion and control of mobile applications
Protecting data and preventing data loss

Foundational to the New Mobile Workspace is a best-in-class workspace virtualization platform built on Cisco Unified Computing System and Citrix XenDesktop.

Check out this infographic which Cisco and Citrix have compiled highlighting some nice proof points of business impact enabled by Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions with Citrix XenDesktop – then, ask yourself – “Can Your Server Deliver Results Like These?”

Is your organization ready to enable a mobile workforce? from Cisco Data Center

While here at Synergy, I’ve had numerous conversations with VDI implementers who’ve resonated with the unique benefits and performance advantage associated with deploying hosted VDI as well as hosted shared desktops on UCS. Surprised in fact, at the number of attendees I run into who are already well familiarized with:

The performance advantage VMFEX brings to XenApp environments

The simplified manageability of UCS Service Profile Templates, enabling rapid turn-up of XenDesktop environments starting from bare metal servers

The linearly consistent performance with scale, proven through Cisco Validated Designs for Citrix XenDesktop

The roster of clientele that have tapped the benefits of XenDesktop deployed on UCS continues to grow, providing these organizations an accelerated path to delivering an enterprise-wide mobility strategy, built on this differentiated virtual workspace infrastructure.

Tony Paikeday

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Looking for an orchestration taxonomy

Roque Gagliano

In recent years, there have been a number of discussions around the subject of orchestration as a key enabler for different Cloud technologies.

The ETSI NFV Management and Network Orchestration (MANO) working group is defining the main interfaces for resource orchestration, a fundamental layer in management.

It is important to define standard interfaces, but equally important is to understand the main capabilities for an orchestration (or choreography) solution. We can gain some more insight by revisiting previous work, particularly in the domain of Grid computing.

Personally, I found the work done by Ian Foster and Steven Tuecke around IT as a Service (back in 2005, 9 years ago!), still extremely relevant. It is fascinating to see how applicable this work continues to be, apart perhaps from the replacement of general SOA services by REST services in particular. We should pay special attention to their definition of Grid Infrastructure: “enable the horizontal integration across diverse physical resources”. I see their work applicable beyond the physical layer, to logical resources and their composition into services. Quoting the paper, the Grid Infrastructure’s capabilities should be:

Resource modeling: describes available resources, their capabilities, and the relationships between them to facilitate discovery, provisioning, and quality of service management.

Monitoring and notification: provides visibility into the state of resources to enable discovery and maintain quality of service.

Allocation: Assures quality of service across an entire set of resources for the lifetime of their use by an application.

Accounting and auditing: tracks the usage of shared resources and provides mechanisms for transferring costs among user communities and for charging for resource use by applications and users

Provisioning, life-cycle management and decommissioning: enables an allocated resource to be configured automatically for application use, manages the resource for the duration of the task at hand and restores the resource to its original state for future use. Continue reading “Looking for an orchestration taxonomy”

Roque Gagliano

Technical Leader

Corporate Technology Group (CTG)

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#EngineersUnplugged S5|Ep10: Automation Demystified!

Amy Lewis

Welcome back to an amazing episode of Engineers Unplugged, featuring Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) and Patrick Carmichael (@vmcarmichael) demystify automation in the modern data center in less than 10 minutes: built-in, scripts, workflow, and policy-based. Answers to your most answered questions about how to start, where to simplify, and elimination of human error. Don’t miss this tutorial.

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Amy Lewis

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Why IT Leaders Stand to Benefit from the Natural Process of Network Programmability

Lance Perry

The programming of network resources is not just a trend, but also a way to future-proof IT and business needs.

This blog series examines how infrastructure programmability is providing a faster time to competitive advantage and highlights the differences between programmable infrastructure and traditional infrastructure, and what programmability means for your entire IT infrastructure.

To read the first post in this series that defines infrastructure programmability, click here. To read the third post in this series that discusses how IT leaders can embrace this change, click here.

By the end of this year, the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth, and U.S. businesses alone will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services. In addition, the growing convergence of mobile, cloud and the network is demanding that organizations implement the right combination of strategies, processes, and infrastructure.

As the industry is changing faster than we can imagine, we are shaping the future with a new model for IT. Today’s infrastructure must be simple, smart, and secure.

A piecemeal approach to leveraging new technology—in the midst of a fast-paced market—could leave businesses disaggregated and left on the sidelines by faster competitors.

Unleash Fast IT, an operating model that delivers simplification and orchestration through automated, agile, and programmable infrastructures. The concept of Fast IT embodies IT being agile enough to operate at the speed of business. This means that in order for your organization to be successful in an increasingly complex world you must have an infrastructure that runs at a speed and scale never before seen.

There are three core principles for Fast IT: simplicity, intelligence and security. In some ways, this model is markedly different from the current IT model, which can be highly complex and closed.

Continue reading “Why IT Leaders Stand to Benefit from the Natural Process of Network Programmability”

Lance Perry

Vice President

Customer Strategy & Success

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Cutting the Cord on WANs

Vivek Kesaree

Rething your WAN Traditional network design dictated that each branch was connected to headquarters or the datacenter where mission critical applications were hosted with dedicated and redundant connections. These Wide Area Network (WAN) connections were typically MPLS circuits that came with service level agreements that guaranteed quality. Typically, there were two circuits to provide fail-over capabilities – the secondary line is commonly an underused or unused safety net. It worked well, it was expensive and it was the cost of doing business for companies dependent on a global reach or being closer to the customer.

With new applications, device proliferation and cloud destined traffic patterns, companies are being forced to rethink the efficiency of this old model. In today’s use cases, branches are simply exceeding the capabilities of these traditional connections and new technology makes moot paying the premium for point-to-point dedicated lines.

In fact, Tech Target findings note that 80% percent of a company’s staff reside in a branch or satellite office environment. This new paradigm completely upturns the traditional thinking of budgeting the majority of your traffic within a LAN and only reserving the WAN for incidental traffic. Furthermore, backhauling cloud and guest traffic over expensive MPLS pipes, only to then send it to the Internet creates unnecessary expense and latency. And as traffic volumes explode with cloud, video and other apps, costs for dedicated MPLS lines skyrocket and the user experience suffers. For many global companies, relying solely on MPLS lines has simply become an unsustainable model.

With the Internet’s significant evolution in terms of performance and reliability in the last 10 years, it now holds the potential for the most efficient and effective path for the oncoming flood of data. Continue reading “Cutting the Cord on WANs”