2014 - Page 194 of 240

March 11, 2014 Leave a Comment

Partner Voices: ePlus Provides Key Benefits with FlexPod Solution

In our ongoing Partner Voices blog series, we always look for interesting solutions provided by our partners using Cisco technology or services. As such, I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak with many Cisco Partners about some of the more interesting solutions they have provided for clients. It’s always nice to talk about the “fun” stuff, and this latest Partner Voices blog is no different.

I recently spoke with several folks at ePlus about a FlexPod deployment they installed for Exostar. This solution is covered in depth in a full case study that is well worth your time to read. I wanted to make sure we took the opportunity to highlight that success story in our Partner Voices blog too, as there were some significant benefits delivered to Exostar with this deployment.

Exostar powers secure business-to-business information sharing, collaboration and business process integration. They handle the needs of many leaders in aerospace, defense and the life sciences. As you can imagine, this creates the need for a highly secure environment for that information. Continue reading “Partner Voices: ePlus Provides Key Benefits with FlexPod Solution”

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

March 10, 2014 Leave a Comment

Enabling the Business Value of Cloud Through Intelligent Infrastructure

Eric Marin

IWAN Image The advent of the many clouds has now become a reality. Enterprises of all sizes and segments are embracing cloud solutions, whether private internal cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, Public Cloud, or some Hybrid. The number of workloads as well as cloud traffic are expected to grow exponentially in the next 5 years.

The shift to the many clouds has significant impact on the role of IT. IT has to reinvent itself to be able to keep control as applications are increasingly moving to cloud infrastructures.

In particular, there are two very strong trends that will require IT to increasingly position itself as a Broker of Services, and evolve from a more traditional role of being an infrastructure provider.
First, line of businesses intend to address some of their IT needs directly by purchasing cloud-based IT services. Continue reading “Enabling the Business Value of Cloud Through Intelligent Infrastructure”

Eric Marin

CTO

Borderless Network Architecture, EMEAR

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HPC in L3

Jeff Squyres

As an HPC old-timer, I’m used to thinking of HPC networks as large layer-2 (L2) subnets. All HPC traffic (e.g., MPI traffic) is therefore designed to stay within a single L2 subnet.

The next layer up — L3 — is the “networking” layer in the OSI network model; it adds more abstractions than are available in L2. For example, IP switching and routing occurs at L3. Indeed, L3-based networks can be comprised of multiple subnets.

I’ve come to appreciate that, especially with modern high-speed networking gear, there is no reason for limiting HPC networks to L2.

Continue reading “HPC in L3”

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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Best Ways to Shift to A Virtual Data Center : Join Now The Conversation

Didier Rombaut

In his paper “A Data Center Fabric is Critical to the Next Generation of Data Center ” published on January 2014, Zeus Kerravala (@Zeeman) wrote ” The data center has gone through many major evolutionary changes over the past several decades, and each change has been defined by major shifts in architectures…in 2011, another major shift began: the shift to a virtual data center. This has been the primary driver in enabling customers to transition to the cloud and ultimately IT as a service…Next-generation data centers will see a greater coupling of hardware and software to bring together both physical and virtual infrastructure. The result will be a fluid, dynamic “fabric” capable of moving IT resources where the business needs them.”

End of January at Cisco Live Europe, Cisco introduced new solutions “Data Center and Cloud Networking Accelerations Continues” expanding the portfolio of data center fabric solutions designed to create this virtual data center.

On March 11, a panel of experts shared the best ways to achieve this shift . You can access here to the recording

Data Center Network Evolution. Why Now
Join a panel of experts
for a special 45 mn conversation

During this webcast, our guests examined solutions to address the need for elimination, integration and consolidation. Eliminating IT silos will allow your resources to be ready when and where they’re needed, and can be achieved by implementing a data center fabric. With the capability of being quickly and easily built—and rebuilt—as necessary, data center fabrics provide an overarching, unified infrastructure to securely house your data and allow for benefits such as:

Consolidation and simplification of the network, compute, storage, and application resources
Faster delivery of services
Enhanced utilization of resources
More productive IT staff and employees
Lower operating expenses

So to be ready to shift into high gear and accelerate , register now to discover the optimal way for a smooth transition.

Resources

A Data Center Fabric is critical to a next-generation Data Center by Zeus Karravala
“Data Center and Cloud Networking Accelerations Continues “ A blog from Shashi Kiran
“And the Momentum Continue- New Nexus Data Center Innovations ” A blog from Berna Devrim

Didier Rombaut

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Virtual Bankers Save Hours and Dollars

Jason Bettinger

We are looking forward to an exciting 2014 where many are predicting this is the year of the Internet of Everything. We foresee this trend affecting the banking industry as well.

As most consumers get connected using their latest version of a smartphone, mobile tablet, or gaming system, these technologies are changing how consumers interact in every aspect of their lives. For example, consumers are getting more accustomed to instant, intimate video conversations with friends and family from their homes, so the next logical step is to add these features outside the home.

Many banks are looking into using video conversations to engage more effectively with customers. UMB Bank, a retail bank based in Kansas City, has transformed how they interact with customers by using Cisco’s video conferencing solution and Syngrafii’s LongPen Solution that resulted in 500 transactions conducted via video with a virtual banker…saving nearly 150 hours for bank personnel.

These time savings grew wallet-share by enabling UMB to meet with and call an additional 1,000 customers and helped the branches increase revenue by nearly 50 percent.

(Source: St.Louis Dispatch, Dec. 20, 2013)

Continue reading “Virtual Bankers Save Hours and Dollars”

Jason Bettinger

Practice Director

Financial Services, Americas Business Transformation

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Sourcefire Open Source Community Webinar

Joel Esler

First off, we’d like to thank everyone for their continued use of our projects and products here at Sourcefire, now a part of Cisco. We love making great software, and we love for you to use it and contribute back. It’s been a great transition so far into the Cisco community, and recently, we held an Open Source Community Meeting at RSA, and we’d like to provide the content out to our Open Source user base as well.

The best way for us to do this is through a Webinar where we can present the current state of our projects, the future of the projects, how the projects are continuing to move forward inside of Cisco and of course, make ourselves available for Questions and Answers.

We are planning to hold the Webinar

Thursday, March 13, 2014

12:00 PM EST

Joel Esler

Open Source Manager & Threat Intelligence Team Lead

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Ask The #IoE Futurist: “Will the future of battery technology prohibit the advancement of computers or technology in g …

Dave Evans

In my role as Cisco’s Chief Futurist, I get many questions about what the future holds and how new technology and emerging solutions will change our lives. Given the positive feedback and the volume of questions being submitted from the community around the first series, I’ve decided to do another series to answer questions from the education and tech community around the Internet of Everything (IoE). Whether the questions are global in scope, such as how the Internet of Everything will shape our world, or small in nature, like today’s Ask the #IoE Futurist question about batteries, I enjoy the challenge of answering them all.

It’s true what most school teachers say, “There is no such thing as a bad question.”

In fact, when it comes to questioning what the future of technology looks like, the ideas from Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book, The Tipping Point, come to life.

Gladwell states that a tipping point is when a small idea, technology or trend crosses a threshold and “spreads like wildfire.” Today, we are witnessing a tipping point in technology innovation that is representative of small innovations that have a compounding effect on society. Microscopic sensors, tiny wearable mobile devices, miniscule packets of energy, and even an AA battery have the potential to impact future innovation and what it means to be connected.

In this post, I’ll answer a question from Chad, a student of Cisco Champion Karen Woodard, about how specifically new developments in battery technology could impact new solutions. Here is Chad’s question:

Question: “Will the future of battery technology prohibit the advancement of computers or technology in general?”

Continue reading “Ask The #IoE Futurist: “Will the future of battery technology prohibit the advancement of computers or technology in g …”

Dave Evans

March 7, 2014 1 Comment

Open Source is just the other side, the wild side!

Michael Enescu

March is a rather event-laden month for Open Source and Open Standards in networking: the 89^th IETF, EclipseCon 2014, RSA 2014, the Open Networking Summit, the IEEE International Conference on Cloud (where I’ll be talking about the role of Open Source as we morph the Cloud down to Fog computing) and my favorite, the one and only Open Source Think Tank where this year we dive into the not-so-small world (there is plenty of room at the bottom!) of machine-to-machine (m2m) and Open Source, that some call the Internet of Everything.

There is a lot more to March Madness, of course, in the case of Open Source, a good time to celebrate the 1^st anniversary of “Meet Me on the Equinox“, the fleeting moment where daylight conquered the night the day that project Daylight became Open Daylight. As I reflect on how quickly it started and grew from the hearts and minds of folks more interested in writing code than talking about standards, I think about how much the Network, previously dominated, as it should, by Open Standards, is now beginning to run with Open Source, as it should. We captured that dialog with our partners and friends at the Linux Foundation in this webcast I hope you’ll enjoy. I hope you’ll join us in this month in one of these neat places.

As Open Source has become dominant in just about everything, Virtualization, Cloud, Mobility, Security, Social Networking, Big Data, the Internet of Things, the Internet of Everything, you name it, we get asked how do we get the balance right? How does one work with the rigidity of Open Standards and the fluidity of Open Source, particularly in the Network? There is only one answer, think of it as the Yang of Open Standards, the Yin of Open Source, they need each other, they can not function without the other, particularly in the Network. Open Source is just the other side, the wild side!

Michael Enescu

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Mobile Government and Telework Week 2014

Kacey Carpenter

Each year I pledge to telework along with thousands of others for the annual Telework Week. Today, I worked from my rpod parked in front of my house. My rpod is my personal smart work space and provides me everything I need to work at home or on the road with secure mobility capabilities that allow me to access all my meetings, applications, and collaboration tools to do my job.

In fact, I could have worked from anywhere and have been teleworking for the past several years.

The Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 (Act) was signed into law on December 9, 2010. The objective is to achieve greater flexibility in managing the workforce through the use of telework. Telework programs and best practices provide agencies a valuable tool to meet mission objectives while helping employees enhance work/life effectiveness to:

Improve Continuity of Operations to help ensure that essential Federal functions continue during emergency situations including snow storms
Promote management effectiveness when telework is used to target reductions in management costs and environmental impact and transit costs
Enhance work-life balance and allows employees to better manage their work and family obligations

This year, Telework Week 2014, was the fourth-annual global effort to encourage agencies, organizations, and individuals to pledge. A total of 163,495 pledges collectively saved $14,003,872 in commuting costs and spared the environment 9,066 tons of pollutants.

Continue reading “Mobile Government and Telework Week 2014”

Year: 2014

Partner Voices: ePlus Provides Key Benefits with FlexPod Solution

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