Today’s “office” is vastly different from what it was even 10 years ago.
Workers are no longer bound by their stationary desktops and LAN lines, but “offices” are literally set up anywhere with laptops, “smart” devices (tablets and smart phones) and Internet connections. Just as offices are easily set up anywhere, at any time, so should business collaboration solutions be as easily accessible.
Today, Orange Business Services launched their new Unified Communications “as a service” (UCaaS) model, or “Business Together as a Service.” This new portfolio of tools, which is based on Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), includes telephony, unified messaging, IM with presence and conferencing. One of the key benefits of this new cloud-based model is that it gives employees access to UC applications on the fly whether they’re looking to do a brainstorm from a coffeehouse or a last minute conference call while waiting for their flight.
Just when we feel we are drowning in information, along comes Big Data to save the day. Big Data refers to a dataset so large it is beyond the capability of a typical database to manage and make use of the information. But a set of advances in hardware and software now allows us to rapidly capture, organize, and make sense of vast oceans of data, enabling us to apply the results to make better business decisions.
Big Data can give us a strategic advantage. For example, investors could see global trends in trading across sectors in near-real time; they could respond much earlier to a downturn in prices in a given sector, avoiding the steep losses incurred by taking later action.
Big Data can also create a richer experience for customers. Bloomberg.com gathers more than 100 data points from every page an individual reader views, processing the data with 15 algorithms to personalize recommendations. Algorithms that understand natural language and rich media and can reason make Big Data technology even more useful in decision making. Novel visualization paradigms, 3D, and gesture interfaces make Big Data understandable and accessible to everyone.
Cisco Live Las Vegas is again around the corner – So back to Mandalay Bay , like it or not
This year will be a very special one with a 2 years celebration of the UCS launch!
In case you missed the comments on this incredible journey, check some of our recent blogs on the subject.
At this point, I am pretty sure that you have already made your plan for this conference (Flying in or not)
Whether you’re coming or not, first thing you want to do is to follow and use our special hash tag #cldc11 in addition of the general #cl11 hash tag
So if you registered to the physical event, here a website to visit to know the data center activities
Please check to make sure that you don’t miss an opportunity to educate yourself, and to meet great people
If you are a data center blogger , please let us know using the following spreadsheet.
I will send you an invitation for a special meet up /happy hourson Monday July 11th -5:00 to 6:30 pm
It will be an additional opportunity to meet our team of bloggers , as well as other bloggers – The virtual world as certainly a lot of virtues, but sometimes it’s great to have face to face conversations .
To thank you for coming , I am organizing also a little raffle with the opportunity to win an iPad
I want also to bring your attention on the presence of numerous Data Center partners who are instrumental in creating with us very compelling solutions : Vblock, Flexpod , Desktop Virtualization, Cloud computing, UCS, Mission Critical applications.
If you are not coming to Cisco Live in Las Vegas , you still can attend some of the sessions on Cisco Live Virtual. So I invite you to register on the website, as the key notes and a significant numbers of sessions will be streamed .
Summers tend to be a bit cool in San Francisco, but acceptance of Cisco’s Unified Service Delivery (USD) solution by Service Providers searching for the best path to cloud is heating up. We’re excited at the progress so far -- including recent records set by the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) which just placed 3rd globally in the x86 blades category in a recent IDC report. A little over two years ago people questioned Cisco’s entry into the compute segment of the data center. The large number of Cisco customers have proven that innovation that brings new levels of efficiency to the data center wins out every time. We’re proud of our customers and the services they’re bringing to market more quickly using the Cisco USD solution and its key foundation technologies like Cisco UCS.
Industry analysts are also seeing a need for an end-to-end solution like Cisco USD and noting the importance of resource optimization, management consolidation, service improvements, and cost reduction as fundamental tenets of efficient cloud service delivery.
Below is a short video commentary by IDC analyst, Courtney Munroe, VP, Worldwide Telecommunications. Courtney talks about the market challenges SPs face and how they can benefit from a transition to Cloud-delivered services. Pay special attention to the core things he believes SPs must address for Cloud: virtualized fabric for the computing platform in the data center, how the data center and the network work together and security across the entire delivery chain.
Cloud Services: Challenges and Opportunities for Service Providers
This week’s focus on Cisco’s Unified Network Services (UNS) portfolio looks at cloud orchestration and the concept of a Network Hypervisor. What is a “Network Hypervisor”?
In the same way that a traditional hypervisor can offer up a modular, replicable set of virtual server resources (including OS, CPU slice, network interfaces), a network hypervisor is a modular abstraction of reusable network services to assemble a flexible data center or cloud infrastructure. Sounds interesting so far, but what does the network hypervisor actually do?
The first function is to allow organizations to pre-define and replicate the modular network containers that abstract a rigid underlying network infrastructure from the needs of individual applications and services. An example of a network container might be defined to include individual components such as logical VM ports, load balancer and firewall. This logical network environment can be assigned and isolated to a particular tenant to provide the network services a particular application needs and where the application VMs can be placed. The figure below shows how some modular, pre-defined containers can be nested and plugged together to offer customized services for a particular tenant. A small number of defined containers can be replicated and plugged together in a large number of permutations to address a wide range of application requirements.
These flexible, pre-defined containers can be device agnostic, just like their server counterparts, and help provide security and quality of service through tenant isolation, as well as application resiliency. During the application and VM provisioning process, the defined network containers advertise their capabilities and are deployed along with the VM in the proper locations. Just like the VMs they are aligned with, the network containers are location-independent and handle all the changes required during VM-mobility, ensuring that the application has the same network services in the new location. Obviously this goes well beyond just the layer 2 and 3 networking services, through to the layer 4-7 application services like load balancing, WAN optimization, and security as mentioned earlier.
