On March 30th Cisco will announce the evolution and vision for Cisco’s Data Center Fabric approach. Cisco has made no compromises for new solutions and offerings to the virtualized and cloud environments that deliver Data Center Fabric flexibility, scale, security and mobility. In addition, you will hear about the latest industry-leading end-to-end storage convergence and also how Cisco has combined LAN & SAN together to ease network manageability.
From an analyst perspective, Forrester’s Senior Analyst Andre Kindness will be a guest speaker to provide his view of the four stages of virtualization maturity and the current trends in cloud computing. Also a video clip from Cindy Borovick, IDC’s Research Vice President will be discussing the drivers and benefits of fabric-based computing talk about the strategic role of data center fabric.
To join this on-line global launch on Wednesday, March 30, 9:00 a.m – 10:30 a.m. Pacific Time. Click here to register.
Musings and mutterings from the annual CTIA Wireless event this week in Orlando, Florida — while trying to recover from the eardrum damage caused by the constant pounding bass coming from the LG booth . . .
• CTIA had clearly been declining the last few years. It will be interesting to see what the official attendance figure is, but the impression was that there were more people on the floor this year . . . even after giving the official number the obligatory haircut.
• Still, the CTIA major domos apparently are the only people who don’t realize that the show would have much more impact if moved to the late summer or early fall. A March event too closely follows Mobile World Congress (mid-February) – a far larger, more global and more influential show. Even the announced move to May for the 2012 CTIA should not make that much difference. Many vendors will still make their major announcements in Barcelona.
• At both MWC and CTIA this year, applications and applications enablement were huge focuses. Not just the network itself.
• Traffic offload from mobile networks, particularly WiFi offload, was big. “I’m doing a lot more research on 3G offload,” one analyst remarked. Another said, “The offload issue is something we’re trying to get our arms around for a major report, particularly as it relates to small-cell offload.”
• As at Mobile World Congress, IP was more relevant than ever at CTIA.
• Also – the relationship between content providers and mobile operators.
• AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile USA, announced just prior to CTIA, was understandably a big topic of conversation. “AT&T was behind T-Mobile on HSPA+, and T-Mobile has the fastest network in the world,” one analyst claimed. “So the acquisition was no surprise to me.”
• Data, particularly mobile data, keeps coming on. No surprise there . . .
• There was discussion of IMS – “. . . Back for one last shot . . . walking around the show floor at CTIA, the evidence was in plain sight,” one wrote.
• Spectrum exhaust and the continued increase in social networking got a lot of attention.
• The RAN was another big subject for discussion. “We’re really upping our coverage of the RAN,” analysts from one firm said. “It’s clearly where the market is going.”
• Analyst comment – “The U.S. needs to open up more spectrum if LTE is to work.”
• Two analysts spoke highly of Cisco’s Visual Networking Index – “There’s nothing else like it out there,” one said. “It pulls information together from a variety of sources, so it has a lot of credibility.”
Suddenly struck by inspiration as he watched the Oscars a couple weeks back, Ross Daniels brainstormed with Tod Famous on how the presentation of the Enterprise Connect Best-in-Show award might have gone down in a more perfect world. Read More »
The Cisco ASR 5000 continues its momentum.
Just a week after announcing that Russian operator Megafon would deploy the ASR 5000 in its regional network. Now, Cisco has announced completion of a new mobile network for Reliance Communications, with the ASR 5000 as a key element. The network will cover 100,000 square kilometers — the largest 3G deployment in India.
With this new network, Reliance customers will be able to experience new mobile services such as high-quality video telephony and high-speed mobile data, along with enhanced music downloads, instant messaging and online gaming.
The deployment also paves the way for implementation of the Cisco® MOVE (Monetization, Optimization, Videoscape Experience) framework, which was announced in mid-February. Cisco’s MOVE empowers mobile operators like Reliance to better manage, enhance and take financial advantage of the rapidly growing volume of mobile data traffic.
Cisco continues to extend its core and edge routing capabilities into emerging markets.
Main One Cable Company, the first privately owned submarine network cable company in West Africa, will be deploying Cisco’s IP Next- Generation Network (IP NGN) solution to take broadband capacity in West Africa to the next level. The platform — including the Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing system and Cisco ASR 9000 series edge routers — will provide a strong foundation for meeting Main One’s present and future business services requirements.
Demand for highly secure, high-bandwidth network capacity from government and global enterprise customers is driving Main One to deploy its new network. Main One will work with Cisco to develop high-quality, IP-based network and application service offerings. Customers will benefit from value-added IP services such as virtual private networks, VoIP, IPTV and advanced collaboration technologies. The Main One network will also enable customers to purchase bandwidth in smaller increments, further enabling broadband penetration in West Africa.
Cisco’s CRS-3 and ASR 9000 are integral to this effort because of their enhanced capacity, high resiliency, and robust IPv6 support.
