Cisco Blog > Data Center and Cloud
In my March 18th post, I wrote about a series of Cisco educational webinars on the challenges and opportunities of cloud computing. Two of the webinars take place soon – April 9 and April 17 – so you might want to “check them out.”
In addition to those webinars, Cisco is joining leading analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, EMC, and Verizon Terremark for a live seminar series in three U.S. cities (Houston- Dallas- New York City ) , entitled
CxOs are adopting the Cloud at increasing rates, allowing IT expenditures to be targeted at business growth. This seminar will address not only why but how the Cloud is being implemented successfully with high availability, security, and regulatory compliance.
Each seminar will delve into the business benefits and adoption trends of Cloud Computing during an informative morning session. Attendees will hear:
- Insights on satisfying ever-increasing enterprise and business unit computing needs through secure, on-demand Cloud-based (IaaS) solutions
- The latest on business adoption and technological trends in Cloud Computing
- Appropriate recommendations for bringing your business into the Cloud
- How the Cloud can help you boost productivity, reduce expenses, and quickly respond to computing resource demands from new projects or business units
I encourage you to register to attend at the location nearest you. Learn how utilizing the Cloud can make your business more flexible, more productive, more cost efficient, and more responsive to ever-changing stakeholder demands. We hope to see you there
Dallas, Texas
April 9, 2013
Houston, Texas
April 11, 2013
New York City, New York
April 16, 2013
Tags: Cisco, cloud, Dallas, EMC, Frost & Sullivan, Houston, NYC, Verizon terremark
March 29, 2013 at 2:34 pm PST
“Applications?” I hear you say. ”Why are Cisco talking about application? They’re a networking company!?” If this is what you are thinking, I’m glad you are reading this blog. As we’ve broadened to be an IT company, we in Cisco Services have been quietly building our application migration capability for the past 2 years. And with cloud, as the leading designers of cloud IaaS infrastructure, we in Cisco Services are in a unique position to help you migrate applications to the cloud, where the skillsets required are not only application migration, but a deep understanding of how to enable your applications to genuinely exploit the capabilities of your cloud infrastructure.
Which takes me to the subject for this blog, Domain 8 in the Cisco Domain TenSM framework -- Applications, following on from my Domain 7: Platform discussion the other week. In our view in Cisco Services, (business) applications are the primary reason for the existence of the data center. Applications drive so many of the decision in the other facets of the data center. And when it comes to cloud (which is my theme for this Cisco Domain Ten series), there are additional considerations related to migrating applications to the cloud. Let’s discuss some of these in this blog.
Cisco Domain Ten: Domain 8: Applications
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Tags: Application migration, Cisco Domain Ten, Cisco Services, cloud_computing, data center, onboarding
March 28, 2013 at 2:00 pm PST
Whether you are amongst those building their own private cloud or amongst those leveraging the solutions of cloud providers, you want to attend Cloud Connect Santa Clara next week.
Cisco has been very active over the past years to accelerate the emergence of the cloud computing model. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco CTO and Lew Tucker Cisco cloud computing CTO have been on the forefront of this evolution, developing the concept of a “World of Many Cloud” and more recently the “Internet of Everything” .
Last week Giuliano Di Vitantonio, Cisco VP Data Center and Cloud Solutions Marketing, was writing about a series of webinars on cloud computing, including on April 17 a webcast with NetApp, Microsoft and Intel.
All other the world Cisco organize events with partners to explain how to address the challenges of cloud deployment and make today the right choices to make make amazing things happen tomorrow. If you are in Houston, Dallas you may want to attend one of the “Adopting the Cloud” event that we organize with EMC , Frost and Sullivan and Verizon Terremark.
So it’s pretty natural that Cisco is a Diamond Sponsor for Cloud Connect , which is happening April2-5 in Santa Clara , California .
The concentration of very active high tech companies makes this event exciting for the visitors (see exhibitor lists) . You will find Cisco at the booth #201. In addition of the Cisco solutions, partners such as AT&T, Dimension Data, NTT, Savvis, Sunguard, Windstream will be there as well to talk about deployments.
A quick look at the list of speakers, starting with the keynotes makes it even more attractive.
The agenda is organized around tracks reflecting the care about of IT organizations, such as private cloud and hybrid cloud, mobile cloud, risk management and security, enterprise SaaS strategies, performance and availability, WAN and cloud networking , cloud economics, applications design and architecture, but also big data and software defined networking .
If you want more specifically hear from Cisco and partners , here are some suggestions :
Cloud Computing, SDN, And the Internet of Everything
by Lew Tucker Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Computing | Cisco
Open source cloud platforms such as OpenStack now allow anyone to build their own public or private cloud. This accelerates private cloud platforms usage to not only meet the needs of rapid application development and deployment of enterprise apps, but when combined with SDN also changes the nature of “infrastructure as a service” as a platform for consumer-facing services. Come explore with us this virtuous cycle created by cloud computing, software defined networking, and the internet of everything.
Wednesday, April 3, 10:20-10:35 AM Mission City Ballroom
Choosing Your Strategy in a World of Many Clouds 
by Pat Adamiak Senior Director, SP Data Center and Cloud Solutions | Cisco
Your organization has many options to choose from in the cloud. We are here to share our expertise on how to safely navigate a world of many clouds. Please join us to hear about the industry trends, strategies, and solutions you can put in a successful cloud playbook.
Thursday, April 4, 2:30-3:15 PM Grand Ballroom G
Enabling IT as a Service – Cloud Management and Orchestration
by Rodrigo Flores Cloud Enterprise Architect | Cisco
The promise of running IT departments as an internal service provider has been elusive. In their quest to deliver ITaaS, many companies have suffered from an emphasis on IT operations and less focus on infrastructure and application development, resulting in a siloed IT environment held together by heroic efforts. The majority of IT spending is dedicated to “keep the lights on” activities, hindering IT’s ability to keep up with the pace of business innovation. This session will address why the answer to this IT quandary lies in the implementation of virtualization and cloud computing, describing these as the essential building blocks for the agility, flexibility, and “services” focus that IT needs to achieve ITaaS. The speaker will describe why IT needs to be delivered as a service and why IT must think in terms of delivering services not servers, and “claims processing” rather than “data processing.
Thursday, April 4 2:30 PM–3:30 PM - Location: Grand Ballroom F
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Tags: AT&T, Cisco, cloud, dimension data, EMC, Hybrid Cloud, netapp, NTT, private cloud, savvis, Service Provider, Sunguard, Windstream
Hello fellow VDIers…if you are reading this blog first in the series and wondering why we are on Question 9, then check out the following posts to see the entire series:
We also did a BrightTALK session as well, please kindly watch the recording here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/7345/68115
Got Storage?
You bet you do! Storage is a pivotal part of any datacenter. Shared storage rules king these days, and really is challenged by the fact that our desktops are the exact opposite storage model: distributed and direct attached.
Specing out and configuring your storage for a VDI environment can make or break it!
Let me put it this way: Have you used an SSD in your desktop or laptop yet? If not, you are missing out on a truly delightful end user experience.
Things just POP! Boot times can be sub 10 seconds. Apps load almost instantaneously. The spinning blue circle that replaced ye ol’ hour glass becomes a thing of the past. And when you sit down at somebody else’s system that hasn’t made that earth shattering change from clanking disk to silent solid state bliss, you just want to pull your hair out because now your application is taking multiple seconds to respond.
THE SAME HOLDS TRUE FOR THE VDI EXPERIENCE.
Except I’ve been on VDI environments that go from a spinning disk experience to something worse (like that floppy up above perhaps?) All this research we’ve done up to this point around optimizing CPU and Memory doesn’t mean a hill of beans if the CPU’s cores are sitting there twiddling their idle loops waiting on storage. Then your end user wants to pull their hair out and go back to their desktop, which is a pain for you to manage and the opposite goal of the project.
So, while we are not a storage company, I think we all agree that storage is a pivotal part of the VDI equation, and we made some quick and general storage observations in our environment.
THE BOOT STORM: 150 desktops powered on simultaneously
It happens…you had to push an app out last minute, and you are sitting at your desk after an all night-er maintenance blast, and you need to power on all of a department’s desktops. What happens if you do this simultaneously to 150 desktops?
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March 27, 2013 at 7:24 pm PST
Okay, I have a confession to make.
I’ve been somewhat amused by Brocade’s recent “Gen 5″ Fibre Channel campaign. After all, the idea that “we’re going to simply call 16G Fibre Channel something other than 16G Fibre Channel and pretend that people will not figure out that it’s really just 16G Fibre Channel” is, well, amusing!
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Tags: 16GFC, 32GFC, Brocade, FCoE, Fibre Channel, Gen 5, INCITS, standards, T11
