You’re probably double-checking your agenda to make sure you’ve booked the most interesting sessions at the Gartner Data Center Conference this week.  Let me help you by sharing a few sessions that you don’t want to miss.  And if you attend one of these sessions and fill out the questionnaire, you’ll be entered in a raffle for a $500 American Express gift card.

The Evolving Data Center: Past, Present, and Future
Innovation is crucial for IT infrastructure to take advantage of new technology trends, including cloud computing and “big data,” while supporting current and emerging applications. Customers will derive the greatest value from the tight integration of emerging software approaches with the underlying hardware infrastructure. This session explores the newest developments in the Cisco Unified Data Center platform, which unifies computing, networking, security, and management to deliver business agility, IT simplicity, and financial efficiency.

This is a must-see presentation from one of the Cisco’s top senior executives in engineering – mark your calendar now and add it to your agenda.

Speaker: David Yen
Location: Venetian Ballroom F
Session Type: Solution Provider Session
Monday, December 3.
2:30 PM to 3:30 PM
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The Programmable Cloud
Trends such as social apps, cloud, and BYOD offer the opportunity to significantly improve customer experiences and increase worker productivity. Making the most of these trends, however, is going to require some new thinking about infrastructure. This session will explore how to build on your existing investments and create a programmable data center that will give you the agility and flexibility to keep up with today’s on-demand world.

In this session, you’ll hear from Cisco IT’s senior vice president of infrastructure – featuring “Cisco on Cisco” initiatives using our Unified Data Center solutions.  See a demo of Cisco IT’s internal private cloud and learn about our ‘enterprise store’ service catalog initiative for BYOD – powered by Cisco Intelligent Automation software.

Speaker: John Manville
Location: Titian Ballroom 2301A
Tuesday, December 4.
1:45 to 2:45 PM
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Tags: Big Data, cloud, data center, events, Gartner, Gartner Data Center, intelligent automation, Intelligent Automation for Cloud, private cloud, unified management

As a quick reminder , to participate to this 6 weeks challenge and have a chance to win every week a new iPAD, you want to visit our Facebook page. The questions are submitted on Sunday midnight PST, and answers have to be provided  by Friday noon PST. Participation is easy and fun and allow you to collect points to compete for the highest IQ score. This best Unified Data Center “brain” will be the winner of the Grand Prize (valued US $2000).  Every week-end , you can answer bonus  questions, which give you additional points to catch up for the Grand Prize

So it’s Friday again, and we  just finished the 5^th week of this contest!

And it’s now time for our bonus questions ! This coming week –end bonus  question are covering Intelligent Automation , LISP, Nexus 7000 , big data , and Cisco Validated Design (CVD)  for Cloud . If you check regularly our blogs,  you are in a good place – Following  also @drombaut and @ciscodc is a good idea to get clues .
Each correct answer will give you 20 points – So you don’t want to miss the opportunity to catch up for the Grand Prize.
If your Unified Data Center IQ is higher than 100 , you still can be the winner , as this week-end can bring you 100 points , the next week another 50 points , and the following week-end another 100 points.

BTW, next week questions , starting on Sunday midnight , will be about UCS Central and UCSM (did you check the announcement?). Another great opportunity to win an iPad!
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Tags: Big Data, Cisco, cloud, data center, IA, Unified Data Center IQ

It’s amazing how some concepts take off like gangbusters in a short duration of time. Big Data is one such concept, that creeps into our conversations because of all the market noise. There is definitely merit to the fundamental premise behind Big Data for most businesses; create better end-user experience, make intelligent business decisions, reduce intellectual waste and monetize on new opportunities or opportunities that did not present itself before. Thus the demand for Data Scientists, application developers, statisticians, mathematicians, etc. -- note these are mostly on the development and analytic side of the house. What’s amazing is large databases have been there for the longest time, in many cases, even the data that are targets now for Big Data applications were also available for the longest time. What has evolved rapidly are the applications tools that facilitate optimized manipulation of massive data sets and flexible interfaces to diverse databases -- example Hadoop.

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Tags: Big Data, data center, Hadoop, operations

Last week, more than 8,000 senior business and IT strategists, including more than 2,000 CIOs gathered at the prestigious Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida.  At the conference, I presented our vision of how Data in Motion will change the way about we collect, manage and extract value out of data.

The Internet of Everything

Over the last 20 years, the Internet has evolved from digitizing access to information and business processes to digitizing interactions.

The next phase will create connections between all the smart objects around us through a multitude of new sensors connected to the Internet.  Two examples:
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Tags: Big Data, Cisco, data center, data in motion, Gartner

Updated: 03/01/2013

You may have heard that the digital universe is in petabytes, global IP traffic is in 100s of exabytes. These are mind bogglingly large metrics. Big data analytics can play a crucial role in making datasets in this space usable – by improving operational efficiency to customer experience to prediction accuracy. While Cisco is the global leader in networking -- Did you know that 85% of estimated 500 exabyte global IP traffic in 2012 will pass through Cisco devices ? – the company also builds an innovative family of unified computing products. This enables the company to provide a complete infrastructure solution including compute, storage, connectivity and unified management for big data applications that reduce complexity, improves agility, and radically improves cost of ownership.

To meet a variety of big data platform demands (Hadoop, NoSQL Databases, Massively Parallel Processing Databases etc), Cisco offers a comprehensive solution stack: the Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data includes compute, storage, connectivity and unified management. Unique to this architecture is the seamless data integration and management integration capabilities with enterprise application ecosystem including Oracle RDBMS/RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and others. See Figure 1. 

Figure 1:

The CPA is built using the following components:

• Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects provides high speed, low latency connectivity for servers and centralized management for all connected devices with UCS Manager. Deployed in redundant pairs offers the full redundancy, performance (active-active), and exceptional scalability for large number of nodes typical in big data clusters. UCS Manger enables rapid and consistent server integration using service profile, ongoing system maintenance activities such as firmware update operations across the entire cluster as a single operation, advanced monitoring, and option to raise alarms and send notifications about the health of the entire cluster.
• Cisco UCS 2200 Series Fabric Extenders, act as remote line cards for Fabric Interconnects providing a highly scalable and extremely cost-effective connectivity for large number of nodes.
• Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack-Mount Servers, 2-RU server designed for wide range of compute, IO and storage capacity demands. Powered by two Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processors and support up to 768 GB of main memory (typically 128GB or 256GB for big data applications) and up to 24 SFF disk drives in the performance optimized option or 12 LFF disk drives in the capacity optimized option. Also features Cisco UCS VNIC optimized for high bandwidth and low latency cluster connectivity with support for up to 256 virtual devices.
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Tags: Big Data, Cloudera, Common Platform Architecture, CPA, Greenplum MR, Hadoop, MapR, MarkLogic, MPP Database, NoSQL, Oracle NoSQL Database, ParAccel