Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important Cisco-related content you may have missed along the way. Let’s have it.
Off The Top
Cisco Marketing Velocity wrapped up late last week with a call-to-action from Sherri Liebo, vice president, global partner marketing. In Cannes, Sherri urged partners to consider WISDOM – “what I say and do differently on Monday” – as they use Velocity takeaways to plan, build and run their revenue marketing strategies. Sherri also stopped by the Channels blog to offer a sneak peek of what’s in store for Cisco global partner marketing in the coming months, including top priorities for growth.
If you missed out on the Marketing Velocity action, fear not – we’ll be providing details about replays and archived content over the next few weeks, and you can also check out our various recaps and the Cisco Marketing Velocity YouTube playlist.
Several analysts and members of the press were also in attendance in Cannes; CRN’s Kristin Bent recapped key messages and also posted some snazzy scenes from Marketing Velocity, and Forrester’s Peter O’Neill offered tidbits and takeaways on his blog.
Read More »
Tags: Cisco, Marketing Velocity, partner, partner summit, Storage Networking, Weekly Rewind
Key requirements shaping Storage Networks
With Big Data, trends like Internet of Everything hitting the data center and cloud, it is an exciting time for storage networking. These trends serve as market drivers with requirements for higher bandwidth, zero downtime coupled with some top careabouts like multi-protocol storage connectivity, ease of management, fast disaster recovery, low latency at scale etc.
New Cisco Innovations
Cisco has been a strong innovator and leader in this market, and it is time to raise the bar yet again.
Today, we introduce two new storage area networking (SAN) switches to the MDS storage networking family – the Cisco MDS 9710 Multi-layer Director and the Cisco MDS 9250i Multi-Service switch.
Read More »
Tags: Cisco Unified Fabric, MDS 9250i, MDS 9710, Rajeev Bhardwaj, Storage Networking
I’m here at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego, and coming off of a high of being able to talk to about 60 CCIE networking rock stars about the next generation Data Center.
In case you aren’t familiar, a Techtorial is an 8-hour continuous spray from the firehose (yes, 8 hours!), on top of the normal Cisco Live fare, that goes into the ultra deep technical weeds. These guys are the ones who are planning, designing, and implementing the data centers that we at Cisco only talk about. Truly stellar group of people who know what they’re talking about.
Our session (I was one of 5 speakers during the day) was a non-stop barrage of some of the most technical networking material you can imagine. We covered everything from Hadoop to VPCs to FabricPath to QoS to VM-FEX, and of course storage.
More and more often, questions from the networking teams are looking at storage requirements as they are planning to accommodate consolidated IO. Not just FCoE, but also iSCSI, NAS, and even Hadoop environments, and they need to know what could come and bite them when they weren’t looking.
When I asked how many of them were already having conversations with the storage teams about converging the networks, about 90% of them raised their hands. As a result, we got into the nitties and the gritties about ingress and egress buffering, COS Virtual Lanes, and QoS bandwidth allocations. Like I said, deep stuff.
As I’ve said before, in my world I have a rather skewed perspective. Since I live, eat, breathe, drink storage -- particularly FCoE -- I see the adoption at all levels in the data center.
And now you can too. I’m going to be giving specific examples of customer deployments at the Expo World of Solutions in Intel’s booth today (Monday, June 11) at 5 p.m., and again in NetApp’s booth on Wednesday, June 13, at 3:00 p.m.
Of course, you can come here it straight from the customer’s mouth, at “Voice of the Customer: FCoE”, where Bart Falzarano, Chief Information Security Officer from Walz Group, will be talking about how his company has deployed FCoE with great success. That session is WoS5030, at the Cisco Main Theatre on Tuesday, June 12 at 12:15 p.m.
These sessions are short -- only 10-15 minutes, so it may not be a good idea to dawdle.
Tags: Customer Deployment, FCoE, QoS, Storage Networking
