One thing is increasingly clear at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention, this week in Las Vegas: Content providers and service providers are quickening their pace in the transition from video signal-based routing to a more data-centric, file-based environment. Why? Because it’s faster, more efficient, and more scalable - all important considerations in today’s world of burgeoning-everything, from content types to distribution paths to video-capable screens.
At the Cisco booth (SU2617), we’re showing how that all comes together -- from video ingest, to file-based workflows to storage, virtualized apps, watermarking and transcoding. And, from there, we’re showing how those file-based video components are readied for content cataloging and publishing.
Earlier this week, Eric Schoch, Senior Director for Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution business and Roberta Mackintosh, Verizon’s Director of Unified Communications and Collaboration hosted a ‘Collaboration to the Cloud’ discussion over TelePresence and WebEx with journalists and analysts in Boston, Florida, New York, Washington and Toronto.
Eric and Roberta expanded on each company’s vision for collaboration in the cloud and gave details on their partnership to offer Unified Communications and Collaboration services. Verizon has integrated Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and now offers an enterprise unified communications and collaboration platform which can be tailored and customized for its customers. The platform can be deployed as cloud-based only or as a hybrid of a cloud service and on-premise offering. In phase one of the deployment, some of the applications included are voice, video, instant messaging, and presence based such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Mobility, Cisco Unified Presence, Cisco Unity Connection, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center (hosted by Cisco).
View the video to hear more about:
o Why I should care about cloud collaboration as a service provider?
o Why are service providers essential for collaboration in the cloud?
o How is Verizon currently deploying collaboration solutions via the cloud?
o What are the collaboration deployment issues that are facing enterprises?
While the IT industry is in many ways moving toward an outsourced model, with the widespread adoption of the cloud and XaaS, marketing has been moving in a similar direction as well. And while PR agencies have been around for quite some time and it has been normal to look to outside agencies for help with creatives, over the past several years a new kind of service provider, the Email Service Provider, or ESP, has emerged from the shadows. Not to be mistaken for cloud-based email security services, ESPs are in the business of sending mass email (typically opt-in), not blocking it. Unfortunately, for many, their first exposure to these companies (outside of an inbox full of enticing offers) has been via news around data breaches, first, in 2010 with Silverpop and now Epsilon.
Today I want to bring up DCI use case that I’ve been thinking about: capacity expansion. As you know, the purpose of DCI is to connect two or more Data Centers together so that they share resources and deliver services. The capacity expansion use case is when you have temporary traffic bursts, cloud bursts, either planned or unplanned, maintenance windows, migrations or really any temporary service event that requires additional service capacity.
To start addressing the challenge of meeting these planned and unplanned cloud burst and capacity expansion requirements, check out the new ACE + OTV feature called Dynamic Workload Scaling announced recently.
Cisco’s foundation for delivering the service provider Cloud is our Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution, featuring tightly integrated, data center and IP NGN technologies to deliver a virtualized end-to-end infrastructure for cloud services. We thought it would be useful to share some new capabilities that Cisco has added recently to the solution:
MPLS in the Data Center: To streamline the end to end operation across the data center and IP NGN, Cisco announced, last week, that Nexus 7000 supports Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) for Layer 3 virtual private networks (VPNs). This allows MPLS to be deployed at the data center core/aggregation layer rather than terminating at the data center edge. This capability enables Service Providers to greatly simplify L3 segmentation, especially for multi-tenant cloud offerings, depending on their scale and service needs.
Another key to the delivery of a data center built for Cloud requirements of scale, virtualization and multi-tenancy has been the use of a Unified Fabric. Unified Fabric provides the flexibility of high performance, highly available networks to support the needs of both LAN and SAN on a consolidated fabric. Cisco’s Unified Fabric announcements last week bring new capabilities which extend our already robust offerings to further build out a Service Provider Cloud foundation.
