It is no small task to enforce change within a well established industry and organization, but it’s not impossible. At Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities’ (LG&E and KU) -- where operations were inefficient and obsolete -- change was needed. With no easy way to obtain data, employees were conducting a lot of time consuming manual paperwork. In addition, disparate systems in which the data lived presented further complications. That is no way to stay competitive in the digital age.

On a quest for change

LG&E and KU deployed Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), based on Intel® Xeon® processors. Using the Cisco UCS® in conjunction with business intelligence software, They found that information from all systems could be brought together, easily accessed, and efficiently reported. This, in turn, led to faster and more informed decision making.

But it didn’t end there. The company is also now utilizing (pun intended) mobility, which allows for access to the system from anywhere, at any time. Users don’t have to be on-site to obtain information that will help them complete their tasks in the field. And collaboration capabilities are proving extremely helpful in time sensitive situations, such as power outages.

No surprise here: the benefits from LG&E and KU’s IT transformation is also reflected in the customer service end of business. Their customers are now experiencing lower costs and higher satisfaction.

Regardless of industry, the lessons learned by LG&E and KU’s implementation can apply to your business as well. Engage with us and find out how.

Read more about the transformation of LG&E and KU and their journey to adopting Cisco technologies on Unleashingit.com.

Guest Blog by Jack Norris

Jack is responsible for worldwide marketing for MapR Technologies, the leading provider of a enterprise grade Hadoop platform. He has over 20 years of enterprise software marketing experience and has demonstrated success from defining new markets for small companies to increasing sales of new products for large public companies. Jack’s broad experience includes launching and establishing analytic, virtualization, and storage companies and leading marketing and business development for an early-stage cloud storage software provider.

Big Data use cases are changing the competitive dynamics for organizations with a range of operational use cases. Operational intelligence refers to applications that combine real-time, dynamic, analytics that deliver insights to business operations. Operational intelligence requires high performance. “Performance” is a word that is used quite liberally and means different things to different people. Everyone wants something faster. When was the last time you said, “No, give me the slow one”?

When it comes to operations, performance is about the ability to take advantage of market opportunities as they arise. To do this requires the ability to quickly monitor what is happening. It requires both real-time data feeds and the ability to quickly react. The beauty of Apache Hadoop, and specifically MapR’s platform, is that data can be ingested as a real-time stream; analysis can be performed directly on the data, and automated responses can be executed. This is true for a range of applications across organizations, from advertising platforms, to on-line retail recommendation engines, to fraud and security detection.

When looking at harnessing Big Data, organizations need to realize that multiple applications will need to be supported. Regardless of which application you introduce first, more will quickly follow. Not all Hadoop distributions are created equal. Or more precisely, most Hadoop distributions are very similar with only minor value-added services separating them. The exception is MapR. With the best of the Hadoop community updates coupled with MapR’s innovations, the broadest set of applications can be supported including mission-critical applications that require a depth and breadth of enterprise-grade Hadoop features.

Read More »

Tags: Big Data, enterprise scheduler, Hadoop, informatica, job scheduling, MapR, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, UCS, workload automation

Please visit Cisco’s TechEd web site to learn more about what we have going on at the show and visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft to learn more about Cisco’s Microsoft capabilities.

I first attended Microsoft TechEd in 1996 in Los Angeles. What a learning experience it was.

This year, I’ll be there staffing the Cisco booth (#1701) speaking about the Cisco Unified Computing System.

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, stop by and speak with the UCS server team.

Cisco will also be demonstrating:

Both the Nexus 1000V and FlexPod are finalist for the Best of TechEd 2013. We are very hopeful this will be our third year in a row to win a Best of TechEd award.

Read More »

Tags: email security, FlexPod, Microsoft, Nexus 1000v, PowerTool, UCS, VM-FEX, vspex

A few weeks ago, I was at  Cisco Open Source Conference 2013 -- a conference hosted by Cisco where we had speakers from IBM, Canonical, Red Hat and Rackspace, among others.  I learned a lot, specifically about the evolution of Hadoop and the OpenStack project.  As a follow on, I collated different activities around Cisco UCS and OpenStack, which I will share in this blog.

Dr. Dan Frye, Vice President, Open Systems Development, IBM, head of the IBM Linux Technology Center (LTC) gave the keynote address at the conference. It was nostalgic considering the fact that I sat in the same aisle as some of the LTC team members in the IBM facility in Austin, a few years ago. His talk included some fascinating historical anecdotes and three lessons IBM learned about open source software development-

1. “Develop in the open” (Don’t try to contribute finished software products, heed to feedback)
2. “Don’t reinvent the penguin” (“Scratch your own itch” – interesting phrase to explain the behavior of communities which want to solve the problems at hand and not those perceived to be problems by external entities)
3. “Work with the process” (The community process is usually an agile methodology with no assumptions on roadmaps and delivery dates)

These lessons are invaluable in light of the open source projects such as OpenDaylight (no pun intended) and OpenStack that Cisco is now an integral part of.  According to Dr. Frye, these newer open source consortiums have the following characteristics:

1. Larger number of initial members
2. Quick starts
3. Relatively large initial budgets
4. Often require the commitment of a specified level of FTEs

Chris Wright from Red Hat expanded upon the principles and ethos of open source projects including release early, release often, iterative development and the culture of giving back. He contrasted the Linux kernel development project with the OpenStack project showing the relative speed of projects with the number of developers and commits by release. He gave a fantastic overview of the various Openstack component projects. He also identified two newly graduated projects namely, Ceilometer and Heat in the Grizzly release. I gave a talk on the requirements for the Ceilometer project, and you can find the slide deck on slideshare.

After attending the conference, I looked for projects within Cisco, which used OpenStack or contributed to it.  Cisco is a major contributor to the soon to Read More »

Tags: Cisco UCS, Cisco UCS API, OpenStack, quantum, UCSM

Next week in New Orleans Microsoft’s trade show season kicks off in earnest with Microsoft Tech Ed North America which will be followed a few weeks later with Microsoft Tech Ed Europe 2013.  Cisco will be a gold sponsor at each event showcasing our datacenter assets.

Cisco continues to double-down on investments for Microsoft oriented datacenters – new UCS SMARTPlays and Solution Paks, Cisco CVD’s for Microsoft’s Fast Track private cloud program, Nexus 1000V support of Windows Server 2012, and award-winning UCS Manager integration with System Center 2012.

At Tech Ed we will be demonstrating key technologies and solutions such as our compute platform UCS and our FlexPod  and VSPEX reference architectures for Hyper-V private cloud environments. For the network platform of course Nexus 1000V will be getting the spotlight. Nominated for a Best of Tech Ed 2013 award in the virtualization category, Nexus 1000V delivers support for key advanced networking virtualization scenarios via integration with the Hyper-V Extensible Switch.

Our UCS Manager solution, with its strong integration into System Center 2012 continues to evolve. Stop by for a demo and see why it is was the 2012 Best of Tech Ed Breakthrough Technology award winner.

Finally, we will be making available demos of our Cisco Email Security for Microsoft Exchange offering. This  Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for Network Access Control delivers peace of mind for your messaging networks.

Please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft to learn more about these solutions and others that help us to deliver to you an optimal Microsoft oriented datacenter environment.

Tags: Cisco, FlexPod, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Nexus 1000v, private cloud, UCS, vspex