This summer the world will be watching London. At the same time, the city will have to deal with millions of extra people and the logistical challenges that go with it. Obviously, one of the most important of these challenges is security. We’ve all seen the furore in the papers about the government spending more on security than they initially planned – up from £282 million to over £550 million. . I don’t know about you, but I’d rather we spend the money than be underprepared during the Olympics and Paralympics…when all eyes are on London.
So, what does £550 million buy you these days? 23,700 security personnel to cover 100 venues, for a start. However, there are also virtual threats to consider. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China suffered 14 million online attacks. It’s no surprise; the information infrastructure is critical to the Games running smoothly. That’s why, as the networking infrastructure supporter of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we’ve been working closely with BT and Atos as the Communications Services Partner and the Global IT Partner respectively to provide robust and secure network infrastructure. But it’s not just those involved in the Games that need to think about security. Businesses are vulnerable while the Games are on too. And it’s a time when they should be capitalising on increased demand and opportunity. Unfortunately 42% of businesses have not reviewed their security arrangements for the Games and will be vulnerable to serious threats throughout the Games period. A key part of this is ensuring their networks are set up to cope with increased demand and potential threats.
Part of what makes the network so powerful is its ability to transform economies and enable countries to leverage their unique characteristics, no matter how remote. Recently on SP360, we discussed how Iceland is becoming a leader in green cloud computing because of its low-cost geothermal power and high speed connectivity back to Europe and North America.
Bermuda, another island nation, is also harnessing the power of the network to maintain its leading role in the international insurance, trading, and financial sectors. Earlier this month, Read More »
A quick report from EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas
Pretty busy day this Tuesday with a lot of topics covered by Cisco experts and partners
Desktop virtualization Interesting conversation between EMC Josh Mello (@joshmello), Presidio Steve Kaplan (@ROIdude), and Cisco Ravi Balakrishnan who addressed major questions in this panel such as common barriers for adoption, architectural innovations and value proposition brought by each company
This Tuesday was also the opportunity to meet Nexus Colin McNamara (@colinmcnamara) and EMC Damian Karlson(@sixfootdad) to talk about VSPEX awareness and potential.
If I become hiring manager for a Data Center team, I’m asking candidates whether they have Tetris skills. Anyone who can neatly fill a space with odd-shaped blocks falling at ever-increasing speed can oversee the rack-and-stack activities in my Data Centers.
I talked in my last two posts – on preparing for and then executing a Data Center move – about planning where you want to place your Data Center hardware. That’s a good idea even if you’re not moving your server environment, because how you deploy your equipment affects how efficiently rack space is used, airflow patterns and more. Read More »
After several days at SAPPHIRE 2012 in Orlando, Florida , where I got to attend amongst many other activities an interesting dialog between EMC Doc d’Errico and Cisco VP Server Access and Virtualization BU Satinder Sethi (stay tuned video coming very soon) , I am back on the show floor this time in Las Vegas for EMC World.
In case you still don’t know (really?) , Cisco and EMC have a very close partnership on many fronts , as one of our very active blogger and speaker Jay Metz was highlighting yesterday in carrying proudly this nice Infographics.
Obviously one of the main topic on the booth was Cisco UCS , whether as a stand alone platform, or integrated in a stack like Vblock, the solution provided jointly by Cisco , EMC and VMware under the brand VCE (check VCE Tom Chatham blog on EANTC Cloud Mega Test )
Recently Cisco and EMC deepened this partnership
“Cisco and EMC have a long history of partnering together for the benefit of our mutual customers, from storage solutions to the original Vblock to VSPEX. For those of you who missed the announcement, VSPEX is a reference design program to help guide customers as they build out their next generation of infrastructure. With our own success with the Cisco Validated Design program, we know this is an effective tool for customers as they look for trusted resources to guide infrastructure investment decisions. “wrote Omar Sultan in his blog “VSPEX: our Continuing Exploits with EMC”
So we invited today on the booth EMC Director and blogger Brian Gracely , our friend, blogger and reseller from Varrow Jason Nash and Cisco Virtualization Architect Ron Valente to share with us the excitement of this first day .
In this short video, our 3 experts talk about “easy to use and manage “. Interesting enough, I was also attending yesterday a Webex session about Cisco.com users based on a very large panel of Cisco customers . According to this survey, one of the major interests for our customers to visit high tech website such as Cisco, is to find information about how the systems are ”easy to use, configure, and manage”.
If you are in Las Vegas today, I’d like to make some suggestions for this second day at EMC World
