Yesterday I met Michael Missbach, Phd., who is the head of the SAP Competence Center based in Germany.
Michael who is the author and co-author of numerous books on the SAP environment .
He used to be a senior consultant at the SAP-HP International Competence Center in Walldorf, Germany, specializing in IT infrastructure solutions. He holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in material science from the University of Karlsrühe, Germany.
Dr. Michael Missbach in-depth knowledge of the SAP environment is providing a tremendous value to the Cisco team running SAP on Cisco Unified Computing Center, providing more insights of the SAP Customers care abouts , and better understanding of the SAP HANA technology .
Today he will talk at 12:00 pm EST in the “analytics” area at SAPPHIRE 2012
Abstract: This session offers real world experiences with HANA implementation and first hand results for HANA scale-out solutions on the Cisco Unified Computing System with Intelligent Intel® Xeon® Processors server platform and why this solution offers a competitive advantage to your business. Learn what customers are really asking for in regard to HANA and why it is important to provide the right solution to lower TCO.
I asked him to share with us what we can expect from this sessions
The second day at SAPPHIRE 2012 has been as intense as the first day -- After interviewing one of the first UCS customer (Monsanto) about the deployment of SAP applications , I did a round of videos with EMC, NetApp and Cisco executives to measure our presence in this market and our collaboration with key players. Stay tuned for the videos on integrated stacks (Vblock with EMC, Flexpod with NetApp) . Today I like to share two videos
I met Cisco VP Marketing, Data Center and Cloud , Giuliano Di Vitantonio, who shared why Cisco is at Sapphire 2012 , and what specifically Cisco and SAP are working on together -- Legitimate questions from some of our visitors, as Cisco has a great image as a network provider, but is still building the recognition as a server and software powerhouse. Take the time to watch this short video to appreciate the breadth of the collaboration and understand why SAP is so interested in deepening this partnership. And in fact, another step in this collaboration was announced yesterday (see the second video)
The second video is the announcement by Flint Brenton, Sr. VP Intelligent Automation Solutions BU, of a reseller agreement between SAP and Cisco
Expect more comments on this solution and agreement in the following days from our Unified Management experts.
Talking about experts . If you are in Orlando today don’t forget
-To attend at 12:00 pm the speaking session from Michael Missbach , our head of the SAP Competence Center
SAP HANA Appliance Software and High Availability: That Is the Question
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Location: Analytics
Abstract: This session offers real world experiences with HANA implementation and first hand results for HANA scale-out solutions on the Cisco Unified Computing System with Intelligent Intel® Xeon® Processors server platform and why this solution offers a competitive advantage to your business. Learn what customers are really asking for in regard to HANA and why it is important to provide the right solution to lower TCO.
As the role of cloud computing grows stronger, IT decision makers in 13 countries shared their plans and concerns in a study commissioned by Cisco and distributed by Insight Express. According to the 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey released this week, cloud deployments are expected to increase significantly by the end of 2012.
A quick snapshot of @ciscodc at Sapphire -- As expected a lot of activities for this first day in Orlando.
On the front of the booth, we got a great audience as our speakers (see list of theater presentations) were covering numerous new capabilities developed by SAP and Cisco around intelligent automation, UCS , Flexpod or Vblock -- Well to be perfectly honest the Mini Cooper games were certainly very attractive as well -- Remember that you can participate to the contest through Twitter, even if you are not here in Orlando (see details here).
I spent part of my day videotaping partners and customers -- Great stories from SAP, Cisco and EMC customers such as Edison Mission Group, or from SAP, Cisco and NetApp (Flexpod) customers such as Chico State University -- “We reduce our footprint by 90% and have been able to move to a much better co-location facilities” ” Within 2 weeks, we were already up and running ” Expect to hear more from them in the following weeks as we will post these videos.
Today I want to highlight the presentation that Cisco Eric Robertson , will deliver at 12:00 pm [ Run Better 2 location] about Migration Path for Your Data Warehouse (see abstract) Eric spent a couple of minutes with me to reinforce in front of the camera the importance of this session, for SAP customers who are not on SAP BW7.3 , but want to take advantage right now of the SAP HANA environment . The Cisco solution is called Bridge Appliance and offers great potential -- Here is a 2mn summary from Eric
Going to Orlando and win a car! Sounds like going to Las Vegas!
IPad , Flip Videos and other little gadgets are cute, but this year Cisco, EMC and VCE are creating a buzz at SAPPHIRE 2012, with the opportunity to win a Mini Cooper (grand prize) or the value of a 1 day free rental of a Mini Cooper (twitter contests )
Twitter contests
-Bridge contest :
Ok !Time to show your writing skills ! In fact no need to be physically at SAPPHIRE 2012 ! This contest is open to the virtual audience as well! This contest starts on Monday 14th 2012 at 8:00 am EST and ends up on Wednesday 16th at noon EST
All you need is to create a “bridge” between two amazing products: Cisco Unified Computing System and Mini Cooper – In other terms , identify a common positive attribute between the Mini Cooper and the Cisco Unified Computing System and send a tweet based on this example “Cisco UCS is like a Mini Cooper …… #sapphirenow #Ciscobooth1185
Follow #ciscobooth1185 and Retweet to vote for the best attribute of Cisco UCS and Mini Cooper
Based on the votes, we will select the best tweet and announce on Wednesday afternoon the winner of a 1 day rental of a Mini Cooper (value $250)
-Picture contest
As Tweeps we are very creative and most of us like pictures (no kidding!) – For this contest you just have to stop on Cisco booth 1185 and borrow one of the Mini Mini Cooper (Mini Cooper toy) with a Cisco Logo for one hour , and take a picture on the show floor and tweet . We hope to see a lot of fun, artistic, if not crazy images. Don’t wait the last minute . There are only 25 toys on the booth !
This contest starts on Monday 14th 2012 at 10:30 am EST and ends up on Wednesday 16th at noon EST
Vote on Facebook or follow #ciscobooth11185 and retweet to vote for the best shot of the Mini Mini Cooper.
Based on the votes (crowd source) we will select the most popular picture and announce on Wednesday afternoon the winner of a 1 day rental of a Mini Cooper (value $250 )
Grand Prize
The raffle for the grand prize is basically open to everybody attending the conference [except Cisco, EMC and VCE employees ]provided you show up on the Cisco booths (#1185) ready to participate to an easy game, which includes attending Cisco theater presentations (see list here) and visiting Cisco and partners booth for demos. Details of the rules are provided on the booth. The game starts on Monday 14th at 10:00 am EST on the exhibit floor .
So if you are these days at Sapphire, don’t miss this opportunity to learn and play at the same time, with the thrill to drive one of these easy going German cars…and if you still don’t know what is a mini Cooper, guess what ..there is one on the booth ! (but you will not be allowed to drive it on the show floor ..)
Or just check this funny video created by EMC- Who said that aMini Cooper is not roomy!
Well, Interop Las Vegas 2012 has come and gone, and it was another exciting week for us. The folks at TechWiseTV caught up with Prashant Gandhi, our Senior Director of Product Marketing for network virtualization technology, to talk all about the latest innovation in the Nexus 1000V portfolio and where we are heading with what is increasingly becoming a very strategic platform for Cisco. Prashant really hits this interview out of the park, as he ties the whole architecture and recent innovations together very well.
The terms “life cycle” conjure up an image of a biology class on butterflies for me. The metamorphosis that a butterfly undergoes is very interesting. Every stage has a specific purpose:
In the data center, life cycle of servers is something we deal with all the time. For analysis we could consider physical, virtual or software servers just like I did in a previous blog. I drew the life cycle of the 3 servers and the resulting diagram is below. Interestingly a physical server is the only one that can be truly re-purposed, more like the stages in the life cycle of a butterfly.
A few years ago Cisco and SAP would never have been said in the same sentence. But today is a different day. As Sapphire 2012 approaches, Cisco has become synonymous as an ideal platform for business critical applications, SAP being one of those applications. The Cisco Unified Computing System is certified for all SAP solutions, include Extra Small, Small, Medium, and the newly certified Large Scale-Out HANA solution that will be featured at Sapphire in Orlando next week. It does not matter whether you want to run ERP on UCS, or SAP on VCE Vblock, or SAP on Flexpod, or a Cisco Bridge to SAP HANA appliance, UCS had a configuration and a certification to meet your needs, and can lower the cost of ownership and capital expense associated with a large scale deployment of SAP.
As SAP has moved into the market disruptive in-memory architecture with its HANA solution, Cisco UCS has moved with them. As HANA evolves into the next IT generation, Cisco will be a solid partner with them in that journey.
Cisco will be an Onyx sponsor at Sapphire in booth 1185, in Orlando from May 14-16. Come by and view the SAP solutions available on UCS. Look forward to seeing you there. Here are the details of what we will showcase . Stop by as we will have also a series of theater presentations and don’t miss our speaking sessions
Also as you are certainly interested in innovation and technology in a small footprint , we have a big surprise for you on the booth . Check out! More ..in my next blog Monday morning
As I think about cloud, Adele’s Grammy award-winning song “Rolling in the Deep” comes to mind. Strange flight of fantasy? I think not. As the refrain, “you could have had it all,” repeats in my head, I think about how similar cloud is to finding love. Like dating , there are a lot of different approaches to cloud , and it is not always clear what the right one is. Like romance, cloud is full of fun, promise, and pitfalls. Like a lasting relationship, realizing the promise and avoiding the pitfalls takes a lot of work. But unlike finding one’s soul mate, finding success with cloud can be guaranteed.. You need the right approach, solid planning, and sometimes a little help from your friends.
Cisco’s cloud experts have been working hard to:
Leading the market with technology innovations such as the Unified Data Center and Cloud Intelligent Network
Creating deep relationships with partners who enable us to provide complete, industry-leading cloud solutions for different cloud approaches
Testing our technologies and professional services in our own IT environment and documenting our results
We have seen tremendous benefits, and so have our partners and customers.
As part of the Cisco’s services organization, I think a lot about what it takes to enable a successful cloud. And I think about how to have a little fun along the way. One of the fun, free things that I have worked on is the Cloud Profile Tool. All you need to do is answer 10 quick questions, and you’ll receive a customized report with recommendations to help you get started. If you like what you see and want to have a deeper, complimentary conversation with Cisco or one of our cloud partners, we’d be glad to set that up. Try the Cloud Profile Toolin English or in another language and let me know what you think.
At Interop this week, Cisco unveiled its new Netflow Generation Appliance (NGA) 3140, which establishes a new standard for high-performance, cost-effective solutions for flow visibility. It empowers network operations, engineering, and security teams with actionable insight into network traffic for the purpose of resource optimization, application performance improvement, traffic accounting, and security needs.
Cisco NGA customer, Human Kinetics conducts online certification courses and tests for health and fitness professionals, and offers print and multimedia content such as videos, ebooks, apps on tablets, and other downloadable material. “We needed comprehensive information about our network to keep our content protected, secure our site against disruption, and deliver excellent, reliable performance,” says Brad Trankina, director of network and information systems at Human Kinetics. “Comparing Cisco NGA to what we had just a few months ago is like comparing our network today to the 3Com hubs we had ten years ago. It’s like a night and day difference.” Read More »
Interop, Citrix Synergy, SAPPHIRE, EMC World .. May is definitely the month of the conferences . What are the common buzzwords for all these shows ? Cloud, Virtualization, Networking.
No surprise :Enterprises, service providers, small businesses, and governments are looking for cloud solutions to solve some of their biggest business and technology challenges.
A solution to these challenges requires an approach that fully integrates the three pillars of cloud: cloud applications and services, data centers, and networks.
Cisco enables a world of many clouds by connecting people and organizations within a cloud, between clouds, and beyond the clouds to the end user.
If you attended or plan to attend these shows, you had or will have the opportunity to listen to Cisco experts and Cisco partners.
But here is an additional opportunity
Pat Adamiak, Senior Director of Cloud Solutions Marketing at Cisco Systems, will be available tomorrow Friday , May 11 from 9 – 10 a.m. PT to discuss trends and opportunities around cloud strategy readiness and economics during an unique Tweetchat *
In this role, Pat has global responsibility for marketing Cisco’s overall cloud solution portfolio, with a particular focus on telecommunications, cable, and media service providers. Pat played a core leadership role in the development and launch of Cisco’s overall CloudVerse strategic framework and offerings and is a frequent spokesperson on cloud.
So join the conversation with @PatAdamiak on Twitter using the #CiscoCloud hashtag,
The Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit hosts user groups for our Workload Automation software customers. Our Tidal Enterprise Scheduler is used by many enterprises to manage the execution of business process and moving data around the data center. We recently met many customers during our user groups in Chicago, Boston and New York City. We see some very interesting differences in our user base and how our customers use our product between these cities. For example in our Chicago
user group during the winter we had some key large customer implementation and many customer s who were deploying job scheduling for department level deployments and wanting to drive the usage throughout their enterprise. It is very common to start using Workload Automation in one key area and then expand into other areas as the success multiplies. It was good to see old friends who have used our scheduler for almost a decade as well as new users learning how to use our software product to accomplish cool new technical use cases.
In Boston, there was great excitement around our new analytics product, JAWS Historical and Predictive Analytics.
and here is some commentary on the value of this solution in my blog on critical path analysis. Back by popular demand was our “tips and tricks session”. This is a very lively discussion of how you can optimize your workload automation deployment and we have our services partners, Cisco and the customers share their best practices. I love the look on a customer when another customer or a partner works collaboratively in the user group to helps them optimize their challenges.
New York City, only a short train ride away was a different story.
Everyone was moving from our older release to our new 6.0.3 release. There was lots of discussion around upgrade methodologies and architectures. Our new API was a big hit with the financial services industry that do many programmatic integrations to drive automation. There was a lot of talk about how to do an upgrade. Do you upgrade one line of business at a time, or do you do a big bang? How do you handle the ever changing state of the job stream definitions? Lots of good healthy debate and best practices where shared.
For me, my favorite time was asking 140 customers across the three cities for their tales of what they would like in the product. We got lots of good ideas and quite few very interesting ones. Many of them were already in our roadmap and many others are being scheduled. It was indeed the Best of Times flying back to Cisco in San Jose.
Cloud is one of the big topics at Interop in Las Vegas, and we’re hitting the show floor with an exciting new cloud management solution! If you haven’t already heard, we recently announced the new starter editionof our Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud software.
If your IT department is planning to take the first steps to implement a private cloud – then this is the solution for you. The starter edition offers orchestration and automation software to enable self-service provisioning for both physical and virtual infrastructure, designed for rapid deployment on Cisco UCS and targeted at simple infrastructure-as-a-service use cases. It’s also configurable and upgradeable to help you on your journey to more advanced use cases in a private or hybrid cloud, including support for a heterogeneous IT environment.
The Cisco Intelligent Automation team will be on hand at Interop this week to talk to you about building private clouds with our software:
This week Cisco and NetApp will be at Citrix Synergy - So I asked Abhinav Joshi, Sr Product Manager, Desktop Virtualization , NetApp to tell us more about NetApp participation, and what the collaboration between the 3 companies means for the customers.
I am honored to be a guest blogger on Cisco’s leading data center and cloud blog site. My name is Abhinav Joshi, and I am the Product Manager for Desktop Virtualization Solutions at NetApp with key focus on Citrix. I work very closely with Cisco and Citrix to jointly define, develop, and roll out innovative and cost effective desktop virtualization solutions and integrations e.g. the popular Citrix XenDesktop on FlexPod solution. Some of you may remember me from my previous life as a Cisco blogger on this site J
FlexPod, a data center platform jointly developed by Cisco and NetApp and delivered by 100s of channel partners has been accelerating private cloud adoption worldwide. In an year and a half since it was launched, FlexPod has grown to more than 850 customers and 500 partners worldwide.WOW!!!
I want to highlight that Desktop Virtualization on Citrix XenDesktop across various FlexCast delivery models has been one of the key customer initiatives driving the growth of FlexPod. Adoption of FlexPod at University of Tennessee and John Holland Group are some great examples of Why Citrix XenDesktop rocks on FlexPod. I wish I could list out all the deployments without getting into any trouble. J
Five years ago, if someone asked if you wanted to BYOD, chances are you would have gently (or not so gently) corrected them, Don’t you mean “B?” In the ever-changing workplace, employees demand that work flex to their style.
Join Cisco at Booth 202 at Citrix Synergy San Francisco, Moscone Center. We will exhibit how Cisco can help turn your desktop virtualization, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and cloud initiatives into strategic investments that deliver an uncompromised service with greater efficiency, flexibility, and security.
Unable to join in person this year? Follow #citrixsynergy and #powerofU for show highlights. Rumor has it @ciscoDC will be there tweeting in person. Bonus points if you can spot them. Double bonus if you say hello (hint: they bear no resemblance to the logo).
Yesterday I met Michael Missbach, Phd., who is the head of the SAP Competence Center based in Germany.
