Today, Cisco announced it has completed the acquisition of TANDBERG, a global leader in video communications. The close of this transaction, and the consequent creation of an extensive combined product portfolio, accelerate Cisco’s vision of changing the way people communicate and collaborate by delivering simple, unique and interoperable collaboration experiences.
The full TANDBERG product line is now part of the Cisco TelePresence portfolio. Through this combined offering, the Cisco TelePresence business provides customers with access to a fully integrated architecture, a comprehensive network-based endpoint and infrastructure portfolio – designed to help provide multivendor interoperability – and a suite of unique experiences, customizable applications and flexible deployment models.
Check out the video below for a glimpse at our TelePresence vision.
Webcast:
Cisco will be hosting two webcasts for analysts and press where Marthin De Beer and Fredrik Halvorsen will outline Cisco’s video vision, Cisco and Tandberg coming together and the formation of the combined TelePresence Technology Group. Both webcasts will cover the same material. For more information and to register for the webcasts, go to:
The momentum of Cisco’s flagship CRS-3 and ASR 9000 platforms continues to increase.
Include Dutch service provider KPN in the camp of those who believe the 322-terabit capacity of Cisco’s new CRS-3 core router – as well as its embedded data center and cloud computing intelligence – is vital for supporting the continuing growth of video transmission, mobile devices and new online services.
Recently Cisco announced an expanded TrustSec solution incorporating unified policy, identity-aware network capabilities, and confidential data integrity. These elements were designed to enhance the viability of infrastructure components (such as Cisco’s Catalyst® and Nexus® switches) and policy/security components (such as Cisco’s access control system, NAC manager, and guest server products).
Cisco staged its first Networkers forum in the Middle East March 29-31.
It might not be the last.
Cisco hosted nearly 3000 people at the Formula 1 automobile race track in Bahrain, the island country in the Arabian Gulf. Engineers and other IT professionals, customer representatives, 10 key industry analysts covering emerging markets, and media listened to Cisco executives, the Crown Prince of Bahrain, and others; attended a variety of the approximately 200 individual sessions and breakouts; browsed Cisco’s World of Solutions, and . . . well . . . networked.
While jittery competitors attempt to pigeonhole the breakthrough innovations inherent in the UCS platform as best suited for a particular workload or another corner of the datacenter, the reality is that the no other line of servers can compete against the newly announced 2nd Gen UCS on a enterprise workload-basis or as a general, high-value compute platform. Consider the following:
That’s because while our competitors are busy converging infrastructure in the Hadron Collider sense of the word—ie, smashing together disparate building blocks that were never meant to coexist in the same space—Cisco is busy unifying the datacenter with a holistic view of the business benefits made possible by unlocking the synergies of network and compute. Bottom line: UCS delivers unrivaled, breakthrough application performance.
Let’s take a look at headline elements of today’s launch:
Cisco unveiled the Second Generation of UCS with 50% more cores, higher performance virtualization than other Extended Memory server, double the CPU capacity from first generation UCS, up to 160 GB/s of bandwidth per blade within current generation blade chassis and 128 virtual interfaces per card with the Cisco Virtual Interface Controller. Bottom line: UCS is now the logical choice for any workload, virtual or physical.
Cisco unveiled 2 new Nexus 2000-series modules (Nexus 2238 and Nexus 2248) with the same functionality now built into every UCS blade chassis. This technology makes it possible to build a virtual machine aware network with a single point of management across 100Mbe, 1 GbE, 10GbE and FCoE server access layers. Bottom line: Cisco FEXLink Fabric Extended technology makes it simple to create a single access layer architecture for all virtual and physical compute use cases—which, in turn, delivers unparalleled cost savings, unmatched investment protection and the full promise of business agility made possible by virtualization.
Cisco updated UCS Manager with integration with systems management tools from BMC, CA, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware. Additionally, Cisco announced the Cisco Developer Network and the availability of an API SDK, as well as a hosted validation UCS emulator, which makes it easier than write directly to the UCS platform and develop unmatched management capabilities. Plus, UCS Manager now binds power and cooling policies to UCS Manager Service Profiles for improved power management. Bottom line: UCS is simpler to manage and integrate than any other platform on the market.
Here is the current roster of UCS servers:
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But wait, there’s tons more to today’s announcement:
