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TENA

Next week in New Orleans Microsoft’s trade show season kicks off in earnest with Microsoft Tech Ed North America which will be followed a few weeks later with Microsoft Tech Ed Europe 2013.  Cisco will be a gold sponsor at each event showcasing our datacenter assets.

Cisco continues to double-down on investments for Microsoft oriented datacenters – new UCS SMARTPlays and Solution Paks, Cisco CVD’s for Microsoft’s Fast Track private cloud program, Nexus 1000V support of Windows Server 2012, and award-winning UCS Manager integration with System Center 2012.

At Tech Ed we will be demonstrating key technologies and solutions such as our compute platform UCS and our FlexPod BOTE2013_Finalist_Partner and VSPEX reference architectures for Hyper-V private cloud environments. For the network platform of course Nexus 1000V will be getting the spotlight. Nominated for a Best of Tech Ed 2013 award in the virtualization category, Nexus 1000V delivers support for key advanced networking virtualization scenarios via integration with the Hyper-V Extensible Switch.

Our UCS Manager solution, with its strong integration into System Center 2012 continues to evolve. Stop by for a demo and see why it is was the 2012 Best of Tech Ed Breakthrough Technology award winner.

Finally, we will be making available demos of our Cisco Email Security for Microsoft Exchange offering. This  Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for Network Access Control delivers peace of mind for your messaging networks.

Please visit www.cisco.com/go/microsoft to learn more about these solutions and others that help us to deliver to you an optimal Microsoft oriented datacenter environment.



Authors

Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Last week I blogged on Desktop Virtualization Automation – and how we in Cisco Services can help you develop custom automation software solutions for rapid provisioning of virtual desktops.

Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation
Cisco Desktop Virtualization Automation

If you are involved in desktop virtualization, or interested in automation and orchesration, you may want to attend our upcoming Bright Talk Webinar, scheduled for May 29th at 8am PST (5pm CET), where you can see a demonstration of our Desktop Virtualization Automation solution in action- you can register for this seminar here.   Look forward to seeing you there!



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

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Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Midwest Open Source Software Conference (MOSSCon 2013).  I met some fascinating people, listened to some great talks, and learned a bunch of new things.

All in all, a win.

I also presented a talk on two things:

  1. The general open source philosophy at Cisco
  2. My specific open source work at Cisco

The slides that I presented are below (slightly edited from their original form; I used a few animations in my original slides, which don’t work on Slideshare):
Continue reading “Cisco’s Philosophy on Open Source”



Authors

Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software

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Cisco UCS has been delivering significant value for IT departments worldwide for 4 years, and customers have made B-series the fastest-growing x86 blade servers in the industry.  What is not as widely known is that Cisco offers a full portfolio of rack form factors, AND that the most popular models of both rack and blade are available online.

Cisco UCS SmartPlays

The recently updated Cisco UCS SmartPlay page provides an excellent summary of special offers on our most popular UCS servers.  We’ve set out to answer your unique operational and application requirements by offering a wide selection of pre-configured and configurable bundles for both rack and blade servers.  Cisco UCS SmartPlays are not limited to the needs of large data centers:  there are many rack and blade server offers available to suit the needs of smaller IT departments.  On C-series Rack Servers, for example, we offer machines configured for a complete Unified Computing environment as well as systems equipped with standard Ethernet adapters for traditional, stand-alone server environments.

Whether you’re just getting started with Cisco UCS, adding capacity to an existing environment, or looking for the right solution for a new workload, check out the UCS SmartPlay page and UCS Build and Price.

 



Authors

Jim McHugh

Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Unified Computing Systems

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This post was also published on the Huffington Post.

Recently, a few of my veteran peers here at Cisco made a video that highlighted our military service and how it aided our ability to integrate into the private sector workforce. What a great experience and opportunity to highlight Service Members and all that we bring to the table.

So, what do we bring to the table?

Continue reading “Veterans Bring Leadership, Tenacity, to Civilian Workforce”



Authors

Mark Rogers

Marketing Manager

Global Public Sector Marketing Team

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It was no great surprise to hear the 2012 McKinsey report Women Matter1 say that women are still under-represented at board and leadership levels. This slow-but-steady progress isn’t for want of trying. In fact, the report notes there are more learning and development initiatives aimed specifically at women than ever before.

This increased investment is a result of a clearer-than-ever business case for the advancement of women. It’s vital to solving complex business challenges and increasingly important that company leadership reflects its customer base. The McKinsey report also highlights the link between the leadership behaviours that women tend to adopt more frequently than men, such as collaborative decision making and their approach to problem solving.

Continue reading “JUMP up and be counted”



Authors

Bernadette Wightman

Managing Director

Commercial and Partner Organisation, Emerging Theatre

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In Taiwan they discovered a natural resource which is badly needed everywhere, but which at least two Intelligent Communities have developed in an endless supply.  This resource was at first difficult to mine and to harvest, but now it is easy and continues to add wealth to the national economy.  It also adds social capital in the form of low unemployment, pride and a reawakened sense of community and culture.   It was discovered close to home.  In fact right inside the home.  In two communities, both with urban and rural populations, it has helped resolve the “digital divide” and, as one CEO told me, turn the divide into dividends.   The resource is called human intelligence.  We once called it “brainpower.”  Companies like Cisco refer to it as “the human network.”  I think of it as “Brain Gain.”  All of us are right.

In a small nation like Taiwan, which has no oil, rare minerals or raw materials that can be extracted and exported around the world, an economic engine has been created using basic cultural talent increasingly harnessed to the Internet.  In the Intelligent Community of Taichung, a city of about 2.7 million, you will find the world’s third largest exporter of high tech precision machinery equipment.  Taichung is also home to Giant Bicycle, the largest producer of those high-end bicycles used by racing professionals and cycling enthusiasts worldwide.  Giant has design offices in The Netherlands and nearly 50% of its sales come from dealers in North America and Europe.  The company employs 200 people to work in R&D alone.  Rather than resource extraction of commodities such as coal or timber, which are the traditional items for many export-driven economies, including nearby China, the exports of Taichung and Taoyuan County are  based on the production or refining of industrial and recreational (or what I call “re-creative”) products.  These arise from R&D, applying added value for higher margin sales and an increasingly important layer of hard-to-match technological or logistical processing.  Each is designed by human intelligence, collaboration and massive data sharing and data management.  Each relies on the Cloud and an educational network which takes advantage of the Cloud’s ability to eliminate the barriers of distance.

Continue reading “Cloud for Local Government Global Blog Series, Project “Brain Gain” & The Rice Bomber (Perspective from Louis Z …”



Authors

Louis Zacharilla

Co-Founder

Intelligent Community Forum (ICF)

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‘Tis the Season – for Events and Trade Shows

Make sure to visit the Cisco booth and talk to the team about Cisco UCS Servers

Well, we are officially deep into the IT and Data Center event and trade show season. 

This is a great time for Cisco and a tremendous opportunity for us to meet and talk with IT professionals about what is important to them.  The discussions range from deployment challenges, to management, networking, collaboration and even failover and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).  It is very rewarding when new customers stop by to say how great Cisco UCS is, how easy it was to integrate into their data center, and how they are using Cisco solutions (including Cisco UCS) to deliver superior performance for their organizations.  The most fun is when they tell me what server(s) there were using and then evangelize to me the benefits of UCS, wishing they hadn’t waited so long to make the move up to Cisco servers and the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).

One of the most compelling conversations I have ever had was at VMworld.  A visitor to the Cisco booth (from a major mid-west university) came by to praise UCS and to ask some technical questions.  The most important question for him was the need to verify the correct NIC failover settings for his VMware environment.  {Cisco UCS Manager lets you programmatically specify how failover is handled, either at the individual Service Profile level or at the Service Profile Template level, depending on your setup.}  The customer did not remember what his current settings were and did not have his VPN information with him, but he still needed help.  While he was calling his team to get the access information he needed, I called over one the Technical Matter Experts staffing our booth.  From the event floor, we actually logged into the university’s UCS deployment, inside the data center (view only mode of course), accessed UCS Manager and drilled down into the Service Profile Template for the VMware servers. The end of the story is that the UCS B-Series server NIC failover settings were optimized for his VMware deployment, which in this case was to let VMware handle it.  UCS adapter policies were set to “VMware”.  Even better was the ability that Cisco UCS delivers which enables this degree of visibility and management.  I can tell you it impressed a number of folks that were watching the process and had multiple questions afterward. {For step by step guidance to set the UCS Service Profile and Templates policies discussed above, see Cisco Virtualization Solution for EMC VSPEX with VMware vSphere 5.1 for 250 Virtual Machines.  Figures 71 through 76 are great illustrations of this capability.  They are located in the section titled:  VSPEX Configuration Guidelines – Physical setup – Create Service Profile Template}

The “hands on” story above was a one-time experience for me.  The truly amazing thing is that it is an absolutely normal occurrence to be talking with someone about Cisco Unified Computing System, and have an existing customer, who is just walking by, join the conversation.  When this happens it typically kicks off a 10 minute “customer and visitor” discussion.  The UCS customer goes into detail about how much they like UCS and the Cisco partnership, the benefits they are getting from their UCS Solution, and how much better it is than their old (always named) vendor. This is not an unusual occurrence, and the depth of customer appreciation for the UCS solution is amazing.

Cisco UCS Manager
Cisco UCS Manager

The most prevalent reason to switch (but not the only one) I have been hearing from customers who have adopted UCS could be best summarized this way:  Cisco UCS is Cisco Unified Computing System. UCS truly does deliver a solution that unifies data center computing.  The key ingredient, the thing that everyone “digs the most” (1960’s flashback), is management – try out the UCS Manager Test Drive. Cisco UCS abstracts the server identity (over 120+ configuration parameters) to reside in UCS Manager, so that any like UCS server can easily be designated the host for that specific server identity – and with UCS it could be a Rack or Blade server.  Not only that, you can use a pre-defined Service Profile and duplicate it to generate a UCS Service Profile Template for broader use.  See this excellent blog by my colleague Ranjit Nayak for a brief intro to UCS Service Profiles – Cisco UCS – Quintessential Fabric-based computing Part 2.  Using UCS Service Profiles drive rapid deployment and potentially more important, screaming fast recovery time objectives (RTO) so data centers stay up and running with the best possible SLA.  It all happens inside a single redundant management tool that enables collaboration and that can span data centers and geographies (Cisco UCS Central) with a lower Total Cost of Ownership.

It is hard for me to leave UCS TCO out of any blog or conversation.  So here you go.  Below is a very short video from EMC World 2012 booth.  It is very relevant to UCS Manager and the IT economic environment, both then and now.

 

We hope to see you at the next event and definitely encourage you to come to Cisco Live.

If you have already been to one (or more) shows and stopped by the Cisco booth, that is fantastic and thanks for your support.

  • If you have upcoming trips on your calendar don’t forgot to stop and see the innovations Cisco is delivering for your IT organization and meet with one of the multiple experts we have staffing the booth. To mention just a few, Cisco is driving significant innovation in:  networking, management, servers (of course) and solutions based designs.  Something for everyone.
  • If you are still working on your schedule and are not sure which event will fit, take a look at our Cisco Global Events Calendar.  There are still multiple shows and events going on worldwide.  Cisco Live, US (late June in Orlando FL) is an incredible opportunity and is always a fantastic event.

 



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Security and Compliance is the next domain in our Cisco Domain TenSM model that I will cover, following on from my previous post on Applications.  And following on from my previous posts around Cisco Domain Ten, I’ll give you a brief overview of the questions that come up when we discuss data center security and compliance challenges with customers as we help them transform data centers, migrate applications to Cisco UCS, and adopt cloud computing solutions and architectures.  Security has and continues to be a major focus area in Cisco, so it was great to see Cisco come top in the recent survey by Infonetics Research, “Data Center Security Strategies and Vendor Leadership: North American Enterprise Survey, March 2013”!

 

Domain 9: Security and Compliance
Domain 9: Security and Compliance

Security and compliance are indeed exciting areas, indeed security is often highlighted in surveys – including my own survey of Cisco customers a few years back now – as the #1 issue impacting customer adoption of cloud computing.  So what are come of the issues, challenges and considerations should be on your mind with respect to security and compliance in the data center and cloud?

Continue reading “Cisco Domain Ten: Domain 9: Security and Compliance”



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)