Avatar

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the largest economy in the Middle East, is universally recognized as the world’s largest producer and exporter of petroleum. In recent years, however, it has emerged as a visionary leader in leveraging networked technology, especially in developing a number of Smart City projects to attract business while controlling sprawl and congestion.

Cisco Consulting Services estimates that KSA alone can gain about $84 billion of total economic value from the Internet of Everything, which is the connection of people, processes, data and things. Nearly $16 billion of this is in the public sector, with profitability, cost savings and enhanced experiences coming from urban services such as smart street lighting, smart traffic management, mobile collaboration, chronic disease control, connected learning and healthcare, to name a few.

Globally, Cisco sees a total $19 trillion opportunity for both the public and private sectors. 

Last week, I revisited Saudi Arabia for the 16th time in five years and saw first-hand its progress in developing Smart Cities, or what we at Cisco call, Smart + Connected Communities. I had the honor of participating in the Cityquest KAEC Forum, jointly organized by the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) and New Cities Foundation, which assembled global thought leaders in some of the most advanced Smart City projects.

I had the pleasure of participating in an enthusiastic panel discussion on local and global urban innovations made possible by “Connecting Through Technology,” moderated by Andrew Sewer, journalist and former managing editor of Fortune Magazine.

As reported in The Arab News, Abdullatif A. Al-Othman, governor of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), kicked off the conference by emphasizing that public sector investments to diversify the economy are “… the most promising and significant in terms of job creation, technology transfer and exports development,” pointing to KAEC as a prime example.

Continue reading “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Smart Connections”



Authors

Wim Elfrink

Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions & Chief

Globalisation Officer

Avatar

The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server continues its tradition of Industry leadership with the new announcement of the best non-clustered TPC-H benchmark result at the 1000GB scale factor, in concert with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition.

The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server captured the number-one spot on the TPC-H benchmark at the 1000GB scale factor with a price/performance ratio of $0.97 USD per QphH@1000GBand demonstrated 588,831 queries per hour (QphH@1000GB), beating results from Dell, Fujitsu, and IBM.

The TPC-H benchmark evaluates a composite performance metric (QphH@size) and a price-to-performance metric ($/ QphH@size) that measure the performance of various decision-support systems by running sets of queries against a standard database under controlled conditions. For the benchmark, the server was equipped with 1.5 TB of memory and four 2.8-GHz Intel Xeon processor E7-4890 v2 CPUs. The system ran Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition and Windows. Check out the Performance Brief for additional information on the benchmark configuration. The detailed official benchmark disclosure report is available at the TPC Results Highlights Website.

Some of the key highlights of Cisco’s TPC-H Benchmark results are:

  • The Cisco UCS® C460 M4 Rack Server delivered the highest TPC-H result ever reported for non-clustered systems at the1000-GB scale factor.
  • High Performance for Microsoft SQL Server 2014: Cisco’s result is the fastest server at the 1000-GB scale factor running Microsoft SQL Server.
  • As illustrated in the graph below, the Cisco performance result beats Fujitsu, Dell, and IBM top results for the 1000-GB scale factor by 80, 31, and 13 percent respectively. Cisco’s price/performance ratio is 29 percent less than the IBM result

 

C460 TPC-H Results
It is interesting to note that although all vendors have access to same Intel processors, only Cisco UCS unleashes their power to deliver high performance to applications through the power of unification. The unique, fabric-centric architecture of Cisco UCS integrates the Intel Xeon processors into a system with a better balance of resources that brings processor power to life. For additional information on Cisco UCS and Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure solutions please visit Cisco Unified Computing & Servers web page.

Disclosure

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a nonprofit corporation founded to define transaction processing and database benchmarks, and to disseminate objective and verifiable performance data to the industry. TPC membership includes major hardware and software companies. TPC-H, QphH, and $/QphH are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). The performance results described in this document are derived from detailed benchmark results available as of December 15, 2014, at http://www.tpc.org/tpch/default.asp.



Authors

Girish Kulkarni

Senior Marketing Manager

Data Center & Virtualization Marketing

Avatar

I blogged in an earlier posting about steps we are taking against Arista’s widespread and intentional use of Cisco’s cutting-edge and differentiating technology in their products. I want to provide an update about steps we’ve taken, as promised when we filed the initial action, to expedite what can be a long drawn out process.

Today, we have formally asked the US International Trade Commission for an injunction (in ITC parlance, an “exclusion order”) blocking Arista from importing and selling products that use Cisco’s patented technologies in the United States. The ITC is an independent agency with broad investigative responsibilities to protect innovators against importation of infringing products. As is typically the case with ITC actions, a consultative process with the ITC preceded these filings, a process we initiated when we filed our legal actions two weeks ago. Our ITC actions cover the same twelve patents we asserted in one of our district court cases. Our ITC actions are consistent with our commitment to do everything possible to expedite review of Arista’s illicit copying. The ITC generally acts more quickly than typically occurs in district court cases, which will help us in our efforts to obtain orders to stop Arista’s unlawful actions as quickly as possible.

One important point in both of these actions (the District Court filing, and now the ITC): our suit is only against Arista and not against any customer. Any suggestion that we will put our customers in the middle of this is not true. Arista’s customers are the victims of Arista’s infringement and copying.

We have no interest in making this a long, drawn out affair. We will move expeditiously to vindicate the principle that to succeed in technology, you need to innovate, not copy. That is why we filed our actions today in the ITC.

 

(Editor’s note: you can read complaint #1 here; complaint #2 is here)



Authors

Mark Chandler

Retired | Executive Vice President

Chief Legal and Compliance Officer

Avatar

Cisco CWS The proven value of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, that we all access daily from multiple devices, makes the cloud a reality, but SaaS also creates an environment in which anyone, anywhere in an organization, can be attacked at any time. Modern Networks go beyond traditional walls and include data centers, endpoints, virtual and  mobile – all linked by cloud services. To some the cloud is an attack vector while to others it’s a business enabler. Security as a Service bridges these two definitions to deliver the scale of cloud engines to address security challenges found anywhere in the Modern Network, whether physical, virtual, local or remote.

Two recent stories from our Cloud Web Security (CWS) Service , illustrate the power of the cloud to address security concerns. The first focuses on the sheer processing power we can deliver from our global data center estate, and the second covers the elastic capacity our investment in Next Generation infrastructure provides, ensuring we can turn up the dial when our customers need more bandwidth, delivered securely.

The first example goes to the heart of our latest announcement, demonstrating how the cloud can learn from one environment and quick leverage that learning to improve the security coverage of all customers.  Last week the CWS team release  CWS Premium for advanced threat protection. CWS Premium combines the two distinct services of Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) which examines file reputation, file behavioral analysis, inclusive of sandboxing and retrospective alerting of infected hosts, and Cognitive Threat Analytics (CTA), which uses machine learning to examine traffic patterns for anomalous behavior indicative of compromise. The combination of these two announcements brings enterprise-class advanced threat protection delivered from the cloud and addresses the number one request from our growing global customer base.

During the AMP pilot we learned something about the power of the cloud-delivered service. A beta user submitted an unknown file to the AMP sandbox, a file not known to anyone – external verification showed zero detects. What happened next showed that the file was far from benign and produced a very detailed set of reports and analysis. The high level summary goes like this: Our sandbox discovered that the file was in fact malware, and then classified the file as malicious in the AMP cloud, sending a retrospective alert to the CWS user. This enabled the user to see where the file came from, the behavior of the file over time and what other systems had been infected. Moving outside this customer, with the AMP cloud aware of the malicious nature of this file, over the next 12 hours the file was detected and removed in nine other CWS enterprise customers, without anyone having to make a decision to change policy or reconfigure existing solutions. This demonstrates the closed loop nature of our system, teaching itself and automatically projecting its new knowledge by way of protection to all of our customers – all without human intervention. If those nine customers within the first 12 hours had – at a conservative estimate – 15,000 end points each, that’s 135,000 users protected without anyone actually doing anything. Within 24 hours that number of customers was beyond 30, and the number of estimated end users at almost half a million and no one pushed a button after the original file was submitted to the cloud.

The second example pivots us away from advanced threats and demonstrates the power of the cloud to scale. We are always updating and investing, growing to meet capacity, and recently we became aware that a very popular consumer hardware and software vendor was about to release an upgraded version of its operating system to potentially test that capacity. I can’t name names, but it’s safe to say that fans of the device worldwide were thrilled by news of new software, and were eager to download the update the instant it was released. This posed a number of challenges, particularly for web security services. Traffic volumes after past such events have increased between 15-20% worldwide, which not only places a strain on our customers’ networks but also means our cloud-delivered service has to be ready to process a vast increase in capacity.

How vast an increase?  The daily volume of CWS traffic for this particular update spiked to 16TB. Stop for a moment to imagine 16TB. Imagine a premium Netflix account, streaming 1GB per hour in HD. Now imagine watching 1,000 hours of video, that’s 41 days worth of constantly watching HD movies.  That’s 1TB.  It would take 656 days – almost two years of data streaming at the same rate and about 4,500 movies – to equal 16TB, the same amount of extra data rammed through the global CWS estate in 24 hours with no degradation of service. And that’s 16TB of additional traffic, not counting the rest of the daily web content being processed.

Our mission has been to proactively ensure that CWS customers continued to experience excellent performance from their own networks during the first few days of the update availability, while delivering the stable, high-performing CWS service that customers have come to expect.  We tuned data centers in readiness, advised customers of the impending spike, gave them the option to block the relevant traffic if they chose and we monitored traffic patterns in real time to optimize loads. No support cases raised and no drop in performance. Mission accomplished.

Today’s cyber attacks threaten precious Intellectual Property (IP), valuable customer information and state secrets. You only have to look at the daily news headlines to find about the next  high-profile attack. In fact, Cisco reports stopping an average of 320 million cyber attacks each day, up substantially year over year. That’s like everyone in the US launching a cyber attack each and every day. The web is the attack vector in an increasing number of these cases. To protect valuable resources requires a threat-centric, operational model that is advanced beyond an attacker’s abilities and addresses the extended network and evolving business environment. Whether harnessing cloud power or offering scalability, CWS is a crucial component in enabling organizations to embrace this approach and capitalize on the efficiencies that a cloud-based model offers.

For more information, visit: http://cisco.com/go/cws



Authors

Raja Patel

Senior Director

Cloud Security Product Management

Avatar

The Internet of Things (IoT) is having a profound impact connecting buildings and industrial networks to IT environments. By linking your industrial sensors, robotics, trucks, and other equipment with your enterprise applications, through the Internet of Things (IoT), companies have better visibility into what’s happening in the environment. More importantly, these companies can more quickly and effectively respond to that information.

Connected Buildings and Incident Management

One area where IoT is changing the landscape is building management.   Traditionally, building management systems have been maintained on independent and proprietary networks.   This worked when the requirements were for stand-alone systems.   However, with the emergence of IoT, these systems are migrating to an IP/Ethernet based platform.   The benefits of this include: (1) improved ability to communicate between systems, (2) better integration with the building IT networks, and (3) ability to communicate outside the building.

One example is in fire and life safety.   Organizations are now looking at these solutions to be more than fire detection and alarm systems by providing additional capabilities and becoming incident management systems.

Edwards/UTC Moving into IoT

For example, when Edwards Fire Safety, a division of UTC Building & Industrial Systems, was looking for ‘Solutions for the Future’, they looked to Cisco. Working with Edwards, Cisco’s IoT business unit initiated a program under a Strategic Technology Integration agreement that combines Cisco’s ruggedized IE 2000 switch with the fire and life safety system.

To properly operate in these environments, networking devices must be highly ruggedized to protect the internal components. Specific and tight connectors are needed to avoid any possible water penetration and disconnects due to vibrations.

For Edwards, this provides a smart, next generation communication platform that provides three key benefits:

  1. Faster Deployments – The “Powered by Cisco” logo is one that is certainly respected and recognized within the networking ecosystem.   Edwards can leverage this logo to quickly address any concerns about the power of their solution components when working with building IT and networking teams.
  2. Next Generation Platform – Allows Edwards to utilize an IP/Ethernet based solution.   This offers multiple benefits including: common platform, open standards, scale and security, and the opportunity to build additional capabilities on the solution to support incident management.
  3. Solution Support – Enables Edwards to easily and quickly perform diagnostic and remediation of networks issues using a smart and managed switch.

Take a look at the solution at this year’s ASIS Conference:

 

Finding Solutions for the Future

Cisco makes it easy to capitalize on industrial connectivity and IT-to-operations convergence. We bring industry-leading network and management capabilities to your harshest environments, while providing end-to-end solutions to address every aspect of industrial networking, including plant routing and switching, field networks, embedded networks, and physical security. And all of these solutions integrate with Cisco’s traditional wired and wireless networking, security, collaboration, and data center solutions as part of a single, converged platform. For more information about Cisco switches, visit www.cisco.com/go/ie2000.



Authors

Randal Kenworthy

Director, Business Transformation

Manufacturing - CPG and Life Sciences Industry Lead

Avatar

Recently the widespread fire of data breaches impacting privacy of millions of hapless people across the globe has become the stirring news. This spree of cyber attacks unveiling the fact that information security industry, organizations and even governments are vulnerable to today’s persistent, well-organized and sophisticated cyber threats.

There was a common theme among all the recent data breaches shown below and that is the amount of time for initial detection, which is in weeks and months.

Cisco Cloud Security

According to Verizon data breach report, 85% of cyber attacks Continue reading “Cisco Cloud Security for Public and Private Cloud – A Secure, and Compliant Cloud Data Center”



Authors

Villayat Muhammad

Technical Leader, Engineering

Avatar

Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) announced the winners of the 2014 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Awards today. Cisco is honored that UCS Mini is one of the recipients! To quote from the TMC press release:

“The 2014 infoTECH Spotlight Data Center Excellence Award recognizes the most innovative and enterprising data center vendors who offer infrastructure or software, servers or cooling systems, cabling or management applications.”

Continue reading “Cisco UCS Mini Wins infoTECH Spotlight Award”



Authors

Bill Shields

Senior Marketing Manager

Product and Solutions Marketing Team

Avatar

The cloud is software in motion.

Our recently announced Cisco Collaboration Cloud did not stop moving once we launched it on November 17. We’ve been pushing code into the cloud multiple times per day and have release several client updates since we launched. The great thing about this model is that we can be delivering new features constantly without waiting for a giant release. This also means that, when a feature doesn’t get done by a particular date, it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t need to wait for a huge release 6-12 months later. It might come just a few weeks later.

This is exactly what has happened with an important security feature which we didn’t quite finish in time for Collaboration Summit – secure media (also known as Secure RTP or SRTP). The version of the application that we launched on November 17 did not utilize secure media in all clients. Given our focus on security this was obviously something we weren’t happy about. But, we knew that it was almost done and we would push it soon enough.

I’m pleased to report that we have indeed pushed secure media. All of our Project Squared clients – the Mac, Android, IOS and web clients send all media in encrypted form to our media servers. The media is secured using a flavor of SRTP known as DTLS-SRTP, which performs the key exchange inline with the media itself.  SRTP is on by default and cannot be disabled. This is consistent with our general approach to security – to make it always there but invisible to end users. Neither our users nor our admins of the collaboration cloud need to do anything to make sure media is secure. It just is.

Of course – we’re not done yet! There is still a healthy backlog of features, including many more great security improvements, that we’re working on. Stay tuned, more stuff is  coming. That’s because the cloud is software in motion.



Authors

Jonathan Rosenberg

Cisco Fellow and Vice President

CTO for Cisco's Collaboration Business

Avatar

On January 13th, 2015, Cisco will celebrate the 1-year anniversary of its launch of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a ground breaking SDN architecture.  It will include a public webcast with the participation of early ACI adopters and our ecosystems partners.  One of these inaugural partners was Splunk,  the Operational Intelligence company for all types of IT organizations.  At the webcast, Splunk and other partners will describe  a range of new solutions with ACI, that dramatically simplify Data Center operations. Here is a preview of Splunk’s solution.

A large portion of the data center operational effort is consumed in managing application health.  This includes:

  • Ensuring the end-user experience for distributed users with different types of performance needs
  • Discovering the physical and virtual resources associated with applications and the user experience
  • Detailed monitoring of resources and events in the infrastructure that affect application performance

These activities have become more complex as applications have become distributed, interconnected or cloud based because they cause applications to move, scale and evolve rapidly.

Splunk Enterprise can monitor and analyze millions of infrastructure events through logs and agents, in real-time. This can provide rapid visibility and isolation of infrastructure that affect application performance. Cisco has been collaborating with Splunk to combine the application visibility of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure with operational analytics of Splunk Enterprise. The result is “Cisco ACI for Splunk Enterprise” a highly scalable application that is orderable immediately at Splunk.com.

ACI and Splunk have enabled a comprehensive view of application health with the ability to monitor the entire end-to-end environment in real time and proactively prevent issues from impacting end users.

ACI provides visibility to application health from the network perspective by tracking all network dependencies and events that impact application performance and security. Splunk complements Cisco ACI by bringing actionable intelligence across the entire data center infrastructure including storage, compute, virtualization endpoints, as well as application tiers and components provided by ACI. Splunk’s analytical and visualization tools provide real-time insights to data center teams to optimize performance and ensure security policies in a highly dynamic environment.

How does it work

Cisco ACI exposes a wealth of networking data previously inaccessible to Splunk. The Cisco ACI app for Splunk Enterprise gathers data from APIC (Application Policy Infrastructure Controller) including APIC network events, health scores and inventory of logical constructs (e.g. tenants, application profiles, end point groups) and physical constructs ( e.g spines, leafs, VMs).

SplunkACI_CentralizedApplicationHeath

This data is used to:

1. Reduce resolution time with accelerated root-cause analysis

  • Splunk enables users to reduce the mean time to investigate/resolve problems up to 70%
  • Centralized management of operational health of ACI environment & underlying entities in real-time
  • Detect issues or anomalies in performance or response times and proactively resolve
  • For multiple tenants, quickly navigate to the source of problems using flexible per-role views, including 1) Help Desk view, 2) Tenant View and 3) Fabric view

2. Provide Central Proactive Monitoring of Cisco ACI

  • Get real-time proactive notification of network traffic and device faults with location, affected objects.
  • Track trends and anticipate application impact

3. Operational Analytics across the entire virtual and physical infrastructure

  • Optimize network capacity and prevent service deterioration with detailed visibility into fabric path degradation.
  • Meet compliance/security with user analytics, including authentication tracking reports.
  • Correlate data from Cisco ACI with data from storage resources, operating systems, applications, security devices, endpoint and more for enterprise-wide visibility.
  • Trace and monitor transactions through all tiers of a distributed application architecture
  • Gives application managers a perspective on the underlying Cisco ACI infrastructure’s effect on applications without being directly involved in ACI Ops.
  • Monitor key operational metrics such as end-to-end response times to ensure SLAs met.

As an example, a Fortune 100 company is using Splunk with ACI:

  • for operational visibility for their ACI cluster with ability to quickly identify faults and troublesome tenants and determine corrective action.
  • to provide centralized visibility as ACI expands across multiple data centers and for proactive monitoring to establish baselines and triggered alerts when key thresholds exceeded.

This approach to Application Health is part of the broader discipline of Application Performance Management (APM). According to Gartner, “By 2018, 60% of APM deployments will use and integrate data extracted directly from log  files alongside wire data and agent-derived data as a foundation for reporting, prediction, and analysis, up from less than 5% today.”  With our collaboration, ACI for Splunk Enterprise provides important new capabilities for  Application Performance Management.

Learn more about Cisco ACI for Splunk Enterprise here.  And register for Cisco’s webcast on January 13th.

Resource

What is APM?

 



Authors

Sandeep Agrawal

Sr. Product Line Manager

Security Business Group