While it’s clear not all routers have a sense of humor, the Cisco ASR 9000 seems to be the exception. Ever since its launch, it has positioned itself as the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day. (I’ll note that on those occasions, even when I had the ASR9000 at the top of my wish list, I only received a Whitman’s Sampler and a neck tie, but no carrier class hardware. Come on, what’s a guy to do to get up to 6.4 Tbps around here?!)
And the winner is…the Cisco ASR 9000 Test Drive! B-to-B Magazine awarded Cisco the “Best Use of Viral Video in a Marketing Campaign.” But wait, there’s more. The Cisco ASR 9000 Test Drive is also one of three finalists for B-to-B Magazine’s “People’s Choice” Award. So, please see for yourself and VOTE for Cisco (we’re second on the list and you can watch the video below).
What matters most, however, is that customers have loved this demo. You can be told that the Cisco ASR 9000 has been architected and optimized to deliver non-stop video content. But until you see the difference for yourself, you may remain a skeptic. So, we took the saying “seeing is believing” to heart and enabled anyone to take the Cisco ASR 9000 on a test drive and see just how this aggregation router delivers video packets flawlessly. With a push of a button, you can control a robot to remove the route switch processor card from the Cisco ASR 9000 and watch as video is delivered uninterrupted.
In my last post about exploring user adoption trends, I shared insights from the Cisco Connected Life User Experience (CLUE) — the unique Cisco tool that tracks worldwide service adoption trends in a weighted index. By comparing how the CLUE index has changed since 2008, we can see not just the rate at which a given service has been adopted, but how priorities have shifted over time.
Once again, Thomas Barnett of the Cisco Service Provider Marketing team:
“People often want to jump immediately to asking if this means that X percent of people in a region are using a particular service. We can get to that, but we’re trying to look at services more holistically. We want to be able to quickly grasp how people’s feelings about services are changing.”
What do you get when you combine 5000+ gamers, a 100GE uplink to the Internet, a lot of espresso machines, and no parents to tell them to shut down the noise or go to bed early? A whole lot of fun!
The Gathering (“TG”), is Norway’s largest computer party and kicked off today for its 20th time since 1992. It’s grown so large now that it is held at one of the venues used for the 1994 Winter Olympics. TG continues to attract growing interest to the gaming, computer, and entertainment event, both nationally and internationally and is organized by the non-profit organization KANDU (Kreativ Aktiv Norsk DataUngdom/Creative Active Norwegian Computer Youth). This year it’s powered at record speed by a Cisco CRS-3 router connected to The Gathering’s Internet provider, Altibox at 100 Gbps, along with technical support provided by several of Cisco Norway’s engineers, Merete Asak and Bjornar Forthun.
This isn’t the first time the CRS has played a key role in a Scandinavian gaming conference. The Swedes used our 40G technology in 2007 at their Dreamhack event as we discussed (and video here), but now this has raised the performance bar.
Although they probably won’t be playing Cisco’s award winning myPlanNet game, they’ll still enjoy others such as StarCraft, Quake, and Heroes of Newerth. Participants also participate in creative competitions in programming, graphics, and music.
If I had to sum up how the 2011 NAB Show will be remembered in years hence, I’d say this: Proliferation pandemonium. The year of the explosion of video content types, formats, and profiles -- most of which require processing, storage, and distribution.
It’s a matrix of complexity that’s expanding at a pace both exhilarating and exhausting.
It was also the year of an unusual level of consensus amongst the various constituents of the video eco-system, many of them competitors. From content owners to technology providers to service providers, there’s one general acknowledgement about managing and scaling all these different platforms for content delivery: This is hard!
The TweetChat we hosted about hot topics at NAB showed that people are focused on streaming TV-like experiences to multiple screens. That, and transcoding, preparing video files in different formats, and adaptive bit rate techniques, to manage the consumer experience when network conditions aren’t ideal. (See “proliferation pandemonium”)
My crystal ball is no clearer than anyone else’s, but it was gratifying to see such a high level of interest in Cisco’s offerings for content distribution focused on secondary distribution, which we call Videoscape, and in our IP video contribution solutions. Likewise for booth activity and interest around the virtualization of video and IT functions, onto a common compute and storage architecture.
And the winner is…the Cisco ASR 9000 Test Drive! 
By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist
What do you get when you combine 5000+ gamers, a 100GE uplink to the Internet, a lot of espresso machines, and no parents to tell them to shut down the noise or go to bed early? A whole lot of fun!