2014 - Page 18 of 240

November 19, 2014 1 Comment

Cisco Releases Tenth Annual CSR Report

I am pleased to announce that Cisco has released its tenth annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report. The 2014 Cisco CSR Report outlines our strategy to use our expertise, technology, and partnerships for social, environmental, and business impact.

Each day, people around the world face many challenges: access to quality education, unemployment, poverty, and climate change, to name a few. We’ve learned that when we bring people together, they find innovative solutions to address these problems. And when you add technology to the mix, we can multiply our impact and uncover even greater opportunities.

For example, in France, a team of Cisco Networking Academy students used the connections between people, process, data, and things to create a networked walking stick for the blind. Watch this video to learn more:

https://youtu.be/X8719XdBB9o

Our CSR Report contains many more examples like this, organized according to five pillars:

Governance and Ethics: Promoting responsible business practices at every level—with employees, suppliers, distributors, and partners
Supply Chain: Working closely with our 600 global suppliers to maintain our high standards for ethics, labor rights, health, safety, and the environment
Our People: Attracting, retaining, and developing talented people through an inspiring workplace, engaged management, and flexibility
Society: Combining technology and human creativity to solve social issues and help communities thrive.
Environment: Creating new business value for our customers using sustainable Cisco technologies, products, and solutions

Here are just a few highlights from our 2014 CSR Report:

We updated our Human Rights Roadmap to align with the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and we launched an online human rights training program for our employees.
58% of our key suppliers set goals to cut their greenhouse gas emissions — up from 45% in 2013.
We ranked number 55 on the Fortune “100 Best Companies to Work For” list.
We made $275 million in cash and in-kind contributions to community organizations worldwide; and our employees volunteered 136,000 hours to support organizations in their own communities.
Employee-led “Pack It Green” projects saved approximately 888 metric tonne of packaging material and are expected to save over $6 million annually through material and freight cost reductions.
97% of Networking Academy students who participate in a selective internship program with local IT companies in Italy get jobs; the partnership is creating a pipeline of tech talent while combatting a youth unemployment rate over 40%.

Continue reading “Cisco Releases Tenth Annual CSR Report”

Tae Yoo

No Longer with Cisco

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Building a true HetNet

Keith Day

By Andrew Mackay, Head of Mobile Solutions, APAC

I have discussed in the past the increasing importance of Smallcells in a Service Providers access strategy (Bringing LTE Indoors and Cost Optimised Indoor Coverage), but to truly leverage Smallcells once deployed in an optimal way is not a trivial task. Normally the Smallcell supplier is different to the Macro network and often a different mix of technologies (e.g in the case of Wi-Fi) and frequency bands are involved. The term Heterogeneous, meaning “diverse in character or content” (oxforddictionaries.com), is indeed fitting. So what is the right approach to building an optimal Heterogeneous Network or HetNet?

The guiding principle must be the consideration of end user Quality of Experience (QoE). Continue reading “Building a true HetNet”

Keith Day

Marketing Director

Service Provider Mobility Business

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#CiscoChampion Radio S1|Ep 41. Cisco Learning Labs (CLL)

Rachel Bakker

#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’re talking with Cisco Engineering Technical Leader Raymond Viscaina, about Cisco Learning Labs (CLL). Lauren Friedman (@lauren) moderates and Brad Haynes is this week’s Cisco Champion guest host.

Listen to the Podcast.

Learn about the Cisco Champions Program HERE.
See a list of all #CiscoChampion Radio podcasts HERE.

Cisco SME
Raymond Viscaina, Cisco Engineering Technical Leader

Cisco Champion
Brad Haynes, @GK_bradhaynes, Client Solutions Specialist Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S1|Ep 41. Cisco Learning Labs (CLL)”

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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Network Services Headers (NSH): Creating a Service Plane for Cloud Networks

Gary Kinghorn

In the past, we have pointed out that configuring network services and security policies into an application network has traditionally been the most complex, tedious and time-consuming aspect of deploying new applications. For a data center or cloud provider to stand up applications in minutes and not days, easily configuring the right service nodes (e.g. a load balancer or firewall), with the right application and security policies, to support the specific workload requirements, independent of location in the network is a clear obstacle that has to be overcome.

Let’s say, for example, you have a world-beating best-in-class firewall positioned in some rack of your data center. You also have two workloads that need to be separated according to security policies implemented on this firewall on other servers a few hops away. The network and security teams have traditionally had a few challenges to address:

If traffic from workload1 to workload2 needs to go through a firewall, how do you route traffic properly, considering the workloads don’t themselves have visibility to the specifics of the firewalls they need to work with. Traffic routing of this nature can be implemented in the network through the use of VLAN’s and policy-based routing techniques, but this is not scalable to hundreds or thousands of applications, is tedious to manage, limits workload mobility, and makes the whole infrastructure more error-prone and brittle.
The physical location of the firewall or network service largely determines the topology of the network, and have historically restricted where workloads could be placed. But modern data center and cloud networks need to be able to provide required services and policies independent of where the workloads are placed, on this rack or that, on-premises or in the cloud.

Whereas physical firewalls might have been incorporated into an application network through VLAN stitching, there are a number of other protocols and techniques that generally have to be used with other network services to include them in an application deployment, such as Source NAT for application delivery controllers, or WCCP for WAN optimization. The complexity of configuring services for a single application deployment thus increases measurably.

Continue reading “Network Services Headers (NSH): Creating a Service Plane for Cloud Networks”

Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

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Endpoint Protection and Least Prevalence

John Dominguez

Let’s face it, malware is everywhere now, and it’s here to stay. The statistics are staggering. According to the 2014 Cisco Annual Security Report, “100 percent of the business networks analyzed by Cisco had traffic going to websites that host malware” and 96 percent of the business networks analyzed had connections to known hijacked infrastructure or compromised sites. It’s a pretty scary reality for organizations and the security teams that are tasked with protecting these organizations from threats.

Not only is malware abundant and pervasive, but it comes in all shapes and sizes, including trojans, adware, worms, downloaders, droppers, ransomware, and polymorphic malware to name a few. Furthermore, it’s attacking us on all fronts, regardless of the device or operating system that we are using.

Continue reading “Endpoint Protection and Least Prevalence”

John Dominguez

Product Marketing

Cisco Security Business Group

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Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data with Splunk Enterprise

Raghunath Nambiar

The Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data is the third generation of Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data with significant improvements in performance and capacity. The solution has been widely adopted across major sectors including agriculture, education, entertainment, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and governments.

Today I’m pleased to announce that we are expanding our Cisco Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data portfolio to include joint reference architectures with Splunk. Splunk helps organizations unlock the value hidden within massive volumes of machine data generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and all the sensors and RFID assets that produce data every second of every day. Many organizations rely on Splunk for real-time end-to-end operational visibility and security intelligence, and as a result index terabytes of data every day across physical, virtual and cloud environments. A high performance, highly scalable, enterprise class infrastructure is critical.

Cisco has worked closely with Splunk to deliver a comprehensive solution with Splunk Enterprise that supports the massive scalability Splunk Enterprise deployments demand while delivering exceptional performance that dramatically exceeds Splunk reference hardware. See table 1. In short: Deploying Splunk Enterprise on UCS-based architectures enables organizations to improve performance up to 25x or index more than a TB/day with a 1 year retention policy.

Optimized for high performance or high data retention the solution is available in single instance (ideal for small-medium deployments) and scale-out cluster (designed for large scale deployments with data replication for redundancy).

High performance option: The single instance solution is based on UCS C220 M4 Server supports up to 250 GB* of indexing capacity per day with 1-month* data retention. The scale-out cluster solution consists of sixteen UCS C220 M4 Server (indexers), five UCS 220 M4 Servers (three search heads, two administration and master nodes) supports up to 8TB* of indexing capacity per day with a 16 day* data retention. Ideal for security, operations, and business intelligence use cases that require extremely fast response times for multiple concurrent searches.

High data retention option: The single instance solution is based on UCS C240 M4 Server supporting a 1 year retention period at 80GB per day Indexing capacity. The scale-out cluster consists of sixteen UCS C240 M4 Server (indexers), five UCS 220 M4 Servers (three search heads, two administration and master nodes) with a 1 year retention period at 1.25TB per day Indexing capacity. This solution is ideal for applications requiring a balance of performance with a long data retention period.

Table 1: Performance benchmark data on Cisco UCS High Retention Single Instance Architecture

Searching (No indexing load) – Average Searches Per Minute (4-64)
Search Type	Cisco UCS High Retention Single Instance Architecture	Performance Gains relative to Splunk Reference HW**
Dense Searches(1 in every 100 events)	68	2.13 x
Rare Searches(1 in every 1M events)	51	25.5 x
Very Rare Searches(1 in every 100M events)	168	16.8 x

Searching and Indexing – Average Searches Per Minute (4-64)
Search Type	Cisco UCS High Retention Single Instance Architecture	Performance Gains Relative to Splunk Reference HW**
Dense Searches(1 in every 100 events)	31	1.1 x
Rare Searches(1 in every 1M events)	15	15 x
Very Rare Searches(1 in every 100M events)	67	9.6 x

Together, Cisco and Splunk are helping organizations break down internal silos and harness big data to deepen business and customer understanding, mitigate cybersecurity risk, prevent fraud, improve service performance and reduce cost.

* Indexing capacity and data retention are inversely related, and a smaller indexing volume enables a greater retention capacity.
** Based on reference hardware specs outlined in the Splunk Capacity Planning Manual.

Additional Information
Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Big Data with Splunk Enterprise