The USS Cisco took off for the Gestalt IT Networking Tech Field Day 2 with Captain Omar Sultan (see picture below, courtesy of techfieldday.com), Data Center Solutions Sr. Marketing Manager, at the helm. Tech Field Day networking industry experts gathered on the bridge, cleverly disguised as the Cisco Cloud Innovation Center (CICC) Lab, for an informal, no-holds-barred conversation on recent Nexus portfolio announcements, the continued march towards automated provisioning of cloud services and ever-evolving VM networking technologies.
Captain Omar at Cisco Networking Tech Field Day 2
For those who weren’t at the event or haven’t seen the video recording yet, please excuse my unabashed geekiness, but you’ll have to watch the first minute of the video to get the above reference. As a new member of the Data Center Solutions Marketing team, this is also my first foray into the Cisco blog-o-sphere, so I hope to share some fresh viewpoints on the day’s events.
Several things were made very apparent during the Tech Field Day session:
At Cisco we recognize that successful telework programs include technology as well as policy and people! When I speak of “policy” I am referring to mandates at state, local, provincial and/or federal levels; as well as any internal organizational policies and procedures to ensure delivery of agency mission. But what about the ‘people’ - your workforce? I read a lot about policy and trends happening around the globe -- focus on GhG emissions, continuity of government, energy and real estate reductions, information assurance, etc… but hear little of ”the workforce” and the acknowledgement that ”work is what we do, not a place.”
Critical to the success of any telework program I would suggest are the ‘people.’ We are what makes any good strategy succeed! If you agree with my thinking, then you may find a recent paper authored by WorldatWork, “Telework: Considerations for an Effective Program,” may help your assessment on workforce eligibility… and help contribute to program success as it focuses on the user of telework, we the people. Here is a sampling of few questions you may take into consideration when determining eligibility of telework… Does the job lend itself t o a telework environment? Does the employee who is requesting the arrangement demonstrate a strong work ethic and does he/she continuously meet his/her work deadlines? More…
As you execute your plan and move from “the evaluation phase” to “training and launch phase” Cisco Collaboration/Video Solutions for Government like Webex and video are very effective training and communication tools to help facilitate your telework program training plans. These secure, collaborative tools can meet the requirements of the entire workforce including employee, middle management, IT and facility organization, as well as help avoid unnecessary travel and expenses too!
When your cloud service goes down, will your company be able to continue doing business as usual?
When you move part of your small business to the cloud, you’re giving the cloud provider control over some of your company’s data. You’re sending your data over the public Internet and storing it on a third-party server. You trust that the data you store on your provider’s network will be safe and remain accessible. At some point, though, your provider’s network will suffer an outage and you’ll be unable to access your data in the cloud for at least a short time.
Outages don’t make cloud computing unreliable or risky; you just need to be prepared. Here are some tips to keep your business running when an outage does occur.
On October 25 at 9:00 am PST/ 12:00 pm EST , join a very special webcast “Evolutionary Fabric. Revolutionary Scale “ with customers, analysts and Cisco executives and experts for conversations about the benefits of Cisco Unified Fabric .
I asked the other day our favorite bloggers Omar Sultan, Brian Gracely and Shashi Kiran to tell me why they think this webcast is important for our customers
“There is a lot going on in the data center these days – There is a continue expansion of virtualization , we see broader adoption of cloud and we see emerging trends, big data being the newest and trendiest of the hot data center topics – So there are folks out there who will tell you, you know what each of these needs special equipment, they have unique requirements , your regular infrastructure will not be able to handle these requirements So what we do believe is that each of these requirements, big data, cloud have their own specific needs , we truly don’t believe that you need purpose built hardware , at least if your infrastructure is built the right way “ Omar Sultan
So this webcast is really about learning how Cisco’s fabric-based approach delivers architectural flexibility across physical, virtual and cloud environments for any application.
For Brian Gracely the equation is simple to remember : Cisco Unified FABRIC is Fast, Agile, Best of breed, Resiliant, Innovative, Cisco-based
I was given the opportunity at Interop NY last week to give a 10-15min presentation at the Cisco booth. If you were watching the twitter stream, you probably noticed the pictures of some of the full audiences we had throughout both days in the booth.
I spoke about cloud and networking, something that both Brian Gracely and James Urquhart blogged about recently. Read on for my slides and some narrative comments. I apologize ahead of time for not embedding the slides, but unfortunately that little feature doesn’t seem to be working currently. We’ve got a white paper on the same topic as well as a webcast series that Brian Gracely has been blogging about.
