Year: 2012

November 14, 2012 Leave a Comment
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Cisco’s Interactive Experience Portals on the Plant Floor, at your Fingertips!

I’m amazed at how tablet computers make things easier in our personal lives.   I can quickly access technology papers for work or research restaurant options for dinner tonight.  I can take an online course or collaborate with my nephew who’s studying abroad.  Some people even monitor and manage their home heating, cooling and surveillance systems while they’re away.  The interactivity has an amazing impact on daily life.

Now, imagine a large-scale, tablet-like system on a plant floor and the impact it can have on business.

Get ready…interactive experience portals for the plant floor are here!

https://youtu.be/9UfpA4HWPO4

Check out Dan Knight’s Interactive Services Engine and X2O partner demonstration from last week’s Automation Fair. 

Just some examples of interactive resources available to plant-floor users:

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Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

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IPS in the Data Center Workshop

I pulled some workshop hosting duty trying to fill Jimmy Ray’s big orange shoes this morning. The subject is a great one – Intrusion Prevention in the Data Center with an incredibly sharp engineer, Stijn Vanveerdeghem.  Stijn is one of those crazy smart security guys down in Austin, TX as he works with a bunch of old friends from the team of IDS experts we have there.

So much emphasis on the data center these days for obvious reasons and it makes sense that anytime we consolidate something valuable – there is going to be an increase in creativity for how to get to it when your not supposed to.

We do these workshops as part of our TechWiseTV shows for their interactivity and the difference in the depth we can achieve.  A number of references were made as to other resources, shows we have done as well as published papers and studies.  I have included all the links we brought up below.

If you missed Stijn’s presentation or would like to go back and take better notes – you can get to it at the same link you used to originally register OR I also highly recommend you bookmark ciscoworkshops.com

 

TechWiseTV Episodes referenced:

TWTV120 – Defending the Data Center

Couple of notable segments within this show worth looking at here:

Clustering Technology with the 5585X

IPS 4500 Series

Episode 15, Firewall Reinvention with the ASA CX, is a good show throughout – only one segment I will call out as a favorite however, a Master Class Jimmy Ray did on ‘Forensic Analysis.’ The differences between network device versus traditional computer forensics and network forensics best practices, why routers and firewalls aren’t the smoking gun, and how the Cisco Router Analysis Tool can help with your networking.

Fundamentals of IPS

Fundamentals of High End Firewalls

Couple of good pointers Scott Simkin lays out in his support of our workshop today – thank you Scott.

The 2012 Verizon Data Breach Report (pdf)

Performance of the Cisco IPS 4300 and 4500 (Whitepaper, .PDF)

Global Correlation on Cisco IPS Sensors (Whitepaper, PDF)

IPS Tech Tips – Protecting Industrial Environments:

Cisco IPS Go page: http://cisco.com/go/ips

Thanks for watching!

Robb

@robbboyd

 

 

 

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Robb Boyd

Producer, Writer, Host

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Ask the Data Center Expert: Data Center and Cloud Trends in Asia

The following excerpts are from an interview with Bernie Trudel, Asia Pacific Regional Data Center and Cloud CTO, Cisco Systems, Inc.

As someone whose world is dominated by cloud, data center, privacy, and compliance, it was exciting to meet a long-term expert with the same-shared interests. Bernie Trudel has been with Cisco for 17 years, and in addition to his role as Regional CTO, he is Chairman of the Asian Cloud Computing Association, an industry organization dedicated to making cloud computing a reality across Asia Pacific (APAC) by addressing the needs for common platforms. He shared his ideas with me on key regional trends,  security to accelerate cloud adoption, and the future of the data center.

What are the key regional trends?

Increasingly APAC countries are adopting a national broadband policy driven by a combination of the adoption of cloud and the ubiquity of personal computing. There is a strong focus on data sovereignty and privacy in response to emerging data privacy legislative measures in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines and also greater awareness around consumer’s rights to protect private data. International connectivity is also emerging as an issue as smaller countries rely on networks that cross geographic borders.

Many of these trends are measured in the Cloud Readiness Index, which uses 10 parameters that focus on risk, power, sustainability, and other metrics to assess readiness across the region.

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Evelyn de Souza

Cloud Data Governance Leader

Chief Technology and Architecture Office

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Cisco + Microsoft: UCS PowerTool for PowerShell Quick Start Guide

A truly “Better Together” story is the pairing of two strong management utilities – Cisco UCS Manager’s PowerTool offering with Microsoft’s PowerShell solution. Together they afford UCS System Administrators the ability to quickly automate and customize a multitude of management tasks resulting increased efficiency and quality utilization of IT resources and staff.

PowerTool is a Microsoft PowerShell module which helps automate all aspects of Cisco UCS management including server, network, storage and hypervisor management. A new PowerTool Quick Guide has been developed that can help jumpstart your learning and use of PowerTool with PowerShell. Available from Cisco’s Developer Network Community, http://developer.cisco.com,  the document can be downloaded here.

PowerTool incorporated with use of Cisco’s UCS Manager and Microsoft’s System Center portfolio can help speed your Microsoft oriented deployments be they FlexPod (Cisco + NetApp) or VSPEX (Cisco + EMC) infrastructure based or platform focused on Windows Server 2012, Exchange 2010, or SQL Server 2012.

Feel free to download the Quick Start Guide and start exploring the power of PowerTool for your Microsoft datacenter environments. To learn more about Microsoft on UCS, please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft.

 

 

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Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Bringing Data Center Class Compute Infrastructure to the Branch

A BrightTALK Channel
Today’s guest article is from Vidya Venkat, Product Manager in SRG for the UCS E-Series.  Vidya describes how UCS E-Series helps our customers deploy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure with optimal user experience and performance.

The main branch office trend today, and really for the past 5 years, has been application and infrastructure centralization.  Applications and services have been moving from the branch office to the data center, or the Cloud, and are being delivered over the WAN or the Internet.  As a result, the branch office infrastructure – servers, storage devices, infrastructure software, and other components – are being displaced by much more optimized infrastructure in the data center.

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Allison Park

Product Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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Protect Data Centers with Cisco IPS: TechWiseTV Webinar

Data Centers are going through a rapid evolution due to industry trends of virtualization, cloud computing and bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives, putting an even greater strain on IT resources to secure the data, applications and access critical to the success of the business. Today’s data center must be secure and resilient to keep the enterprise running at maximum productivity; protecting its profitability and reputation.

The modern enterprise runs a wide array of commercial and customized applications, and the data within those applications is exactly what attackers are targeting. Those critical applications and servers within the data center continue to be the subject of targeted attacks and sophisticated malware. The 2012 Verizon Data Breach Report highlights that attacks against servers accounted for 94% of all data compromised last year. Strong security controls and visibility measures must be implemented to protect the integrity of the enterprise data center.

Click below to watch a Cisco TechwiseTV Workshop on protecting today’s data center using Cisco Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS).

http://www.cisco.com/go/semreg/urls/105149/2/000071953

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Christina Hausman

Product Marketing Manager

Security

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Webinar Thursday: Sneak Peek on #ConnectedMobile

This Thursday at 10a.m. PST, we have a fabulous webinar where we’ll discuss a new wi-fi solution that can help businesses more effectively engage and better understand their customers.  What’s cool is that this new wi-fi solution will help businesses offer personalized and enhanced mobile experiences for their end users – even based on where they are or how long they’ve been at a particular spot.  A great part of this webcast will be the discussion on how businesses who’ve deployed it are using this new tech.  Click on the image to the right to register. 

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Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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What Is Cisco UNIFIED FABRIC? Why Should You Care?

Is your network ready to help you transform and be the strategic partner that you can be? Let’s face it… Today’s data centers are challenged with siloed resources and facilities… Limited scalability… Poor resource utilization… Growing complexity…Perhaps the biggest challenge is time.  When 80% of your resources are dedicated to “keeping the lights on” and managing all what you have, there is very little time left for innovation that benefits the business.

And the reality is that the role of IT has to change – from a cost center to a business strategic partner!  Why? Because there are increasing demands on IT to help your business differentiate in order to survive and grow in these rough economic conditions. And let’s not forget that the increasing cost pressures, technology changes, and the advent of game-changers like cloud are forcing IT executives to look at how to deliver IT differently. 

These growing demands put even more pressure on the shoulders of IT especially given the current state of your Data Centers. The data center network sits at the core of IT and is key to how IT can deliver services and provide value back to the business.

So what do you do?  The good news is that …

Continue reading “What Is Cisco UNIFIED FABRIC? Why Should You Care?”

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Berna Devrim

Former Senior Manager of Marketing

No Longer at Cisco