Time flies! I’m off to the Gartner Data Center conference in London again. And as per last year, I’ll drive my this ancient and very historical Bothwell Castle on my way to the airport.
Bothwell Castle
Last year I was very busy at the Cisco stand in the Solution Showcase. This time, I’m spending all of my visit in the actual conference sessions, learning about top concerns and trends in the data center world, and I plan to tweet out some of the most interesting and controversial learnings, as well as following up in subsequent blogs here. So follow me on Twitter @StephenSatCisco to learn what is surprising me (and I’ll use hashtags #CiscoDC #GartnerDC. And if you are at the conference, I should be near the Cisco stand at the breaks so drop by and say hello!
EDUCAUSE is the largest Higher Ed IT event of the year, attracting about 5,000 key decision makers from the United States, Canada, and around the world.
Cisco will be exhibiting at booth 1114, where we will showcase our Connected Learning solutions for higher education. Visitors will learn how to use their campus network infrastructure to save money, improve efficiency, enhance safety and security, and prepare the next-generation workforce.
Join us for demonstrations and presentations by education technology experts, covering a range of topics, including:
As the London 2012 Olympics kicks off today, the 100m sprint event will be one I’ll definitely be watching on TV. And with Cisco as the Official Network Infrastructure Supporter for London 2012 - an event that is generating huge excitement here in Cisco UK and Ireland as well as Cisco globally, let me use an Olympics analogy to illustrate how Cisco Services helps you accelerate deployment of our recently announced Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition, described in excellent detail by my good colleagues Wayne Green and Jason Schroedl.
The Acceleration is in the Preparation
While the 100m sprint will (hopefully!) be won in a sub-10 second time, without doubt the winner will have taken much, much longer in preparation. Like all the Olympic sports, the 100 sprint is an event where the participants will have prepared for several -- if not many -- years. They are at the top of their game. As I learned recently in a seminar at our Cisco Scotland office with Olympic medal winners Roger Black and Steve Backley, what is maybe not so visible is that they all have an extensive team behind them, helping them deliver that fantastic time. And despite their own expertise, commitment and talent, they will have called on specialist expertise -- physios, expert trainers, even sports psychologists -- to help them accelerate from those starting blocks and over that finishing line in record time. And for those competitors participating for the first time in such a major event, this background team will be all the more important in helping them develop their race plan.
So now onto cloud automation, and how Cisco Services can -- in an analagous manner -- help you accelerate from the starting block with Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud Starter Edition ….
Where were you in 1998? Somewhere in one of our customers, a customer booted one of our 3640 routers, and it’s been running ever since without a reboot!
It’s been running since last century! Wow. It’s been running since around the time my daughter was born, and a good few years before my son was born! It’s been running longer that some of our competitors have been in existence, and longer than Juniper Networks has been a publicly traded company!
I learned this from an email was passed around my office, that highlighted this remarkable evidence of reliability. It made me wonder, in your data center, what is your longest running piece of Cisco data center equipment?
And it also reminded me of some of our best practices for network reliability, such as Cisco Smart Services, described in this short VoD:
So now for the evidence. As you can see from the “show version” Cisco IOS output below ……
March 2009 was an exciting time for both for Cisco and for me personally. Cisco launched the revolutionary Unified Computing System, with many observers across the industry doubting if we’d stay the course (and if we’re honest, some truly misplaced derision -- I wonder who is on Planet Zircon now!). And I joined the Cisco Data Center Services team from the Cisco R&D organization! So with the recent third generation launch of Cisco UCS, described very well by my colleague Todd Brannon, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on our data center services portfolio around that time, and where we are now. My previous blogs chronicle part of this journey, however I have to say, the direct comparison I draw here I personally think shows that we have indeed brought a new transformational experience to the data center for our customers. And I’d like to give you my personal recollections on how and what I found out about Cisco’s approach to shaking the incumbents’ lack of innovation in the blade server market.
