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The so-called “data deluge” shows no signs of abating anytime soon. Facebook, for example, has more than 2.5 billion pieces of content and ingests more than 500 terabytes of new content daily.  Mobile devices are driving this growth of data.  The global proliferation of devices estimated to reach 10 billion by 2017—or 1.4 times the number of people on the planet. As a result mobile-data traffic is exploding. The recently released Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) predicts that global mobile-data traffic will increase 13-fold from 2012 to 2017, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month.

But along with the challenges inherent to this tsunami of data, opportunities abound for monetizing and optimizing information. All of those new mobile consumers—in developed and emerging markets alike—will demand enhanced Connected Life experiences that will be newer, better, and more personalized. Data is the “new oil” that will fuel this opportunity. Networks and the Internet have a critical role to play in the future of Big Data. First, they are the collectors and disseminators of data, gathering it from the millions of Internet-enabled devices, applications, and sensors, then storing it in the right place for analysis and further action. Second, they are creators of critical information on location, presence, device type, application, and more. Continue reading “Service Providers Are Sitting on a Gold Mine of Data”

Authors

Stuart Taylor

Director

Service Provider Transformation Group

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Frustrated. That’s how Wharton School of Business Professor Karl Ulrich feels when he cannot engage with students enrolled in the prestigious University of Pennsylvania’s remote campus in San Francisco.

Given how many hats members of the faculty from the school wear, it’s a real challenge. Take Ulrich. In addition to his duties as a professor, he also serves as the Vice Dean of Innovation at the Wharton School. Add to that his work as a researcher, entrepreneur and author, and you get a professor who wants to spend time with students – but can’t – due to time and distance. The same is true of remote students who are eager to spend time with the Philadelphia-based professors for which Wharton is renowned. It’s been frustrating!

Until now.

Today, Wharton and Cisco are taking the wraps off a technology that will change the way we look at education. In the “Cisco Connected Classrooms” unveiled in San Francisco and Philadelphia, Wharton educators can interact with remote students separated by thousands of miles as though they were in the same room. I’ve had a chance to join students and professors today and experience first-hand how we can transform education and become truly collaborative. I want to congratulate the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group, Inder Sidhu and Shailendra Gupta, and the educators and technologists from Wharton. They have produced a true breakthrough in education.

Continue reading “The Future of Education: #TomorrowStartsHere”

Authors

Rob Lloyd

President, Development and Sales

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Our hospitality team and MGM Resorts are collaborating again this week at the HTNG North American Conference to discuss key trends in the industry and how Wi-Fi is changing the guest experience.

Remember Bob’s Big Ideas Session at NRF? If you’re at HTNG, make sure you attend the Keynote, featuring our very own Bob Friday, CTO, Wireless Networking Group, Cisco and Cisco partner John Bollen, MGM resorts VP of IT.

Read more at http://www.htng.org/conferences/north-american/speakers#friday

 

 

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There’s a great sketch that Louis CK does about our impatience with technology and how much we’ve come to take it for granted. Our ability to connect from anywhere has raised our expectations for being able to instantly get or do what we want. And, when it comes to small businesses, that expectation turns to urgency for keeping productivity levels high. It’s this kind of thinking that framed the development of the new Cisco Small Business RV215W router.

The idea was to create a router that was versatile, but could also pack all your essential networking needs in a single device. The output: an all-in-one router that combines wireless-n, a secure firewall, a four-port switch, and a USB port for broadband connectivity. For customers, that translates to a simplified way to ensure that whatever business is at hand can be done securely and without interruption.

Check out this quick video featuring one of our product managers, to hear his personal take on why he’s excited about this new offering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZrsEyKIWE

To learn more about the Cisco Small Business RV-Series Routers, click here.

Authors

Linda Beaton

Marketing Manager

GMP Data Center Marketing Team

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qrcode_EntAppI often find myself with colleagues and friends having an app discussion that at times feels like an exciting discovery session and other times feels like an “app showdown”. It’s either a case of “Wow, that’s cool”, or “My apps are better than yours”. I prefer the former discussion to the latter, because in the end we can all benefit from learning about new ways and new tools to make our day more productive, or our lives easier, or just a lot more fun!

Well, here’s an app that accomplishes all three of those goals – the new Cisco Enterprise Networks App. It will help you be more productive, because if you are interested in The Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network (CIN) and/or Cisco Unified Access (UA), you can focus on just those – in one convenient place.  Download it, and you’ll be able to access the latest CIN and UA videos, presentations, and product information and Cisco technology innovations as well as access to our social media channels. That’s bound to make your life a little easier! Continue reading “Get more productive and have some fun – The new Cisco Enterprise Networks App”

Authors

Frank Petkovich

Product and Communications Manager

Marketing

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Salem Health is a network of hospitals, rehab facilities, and physician clinics located in the Pacific Northwest. The organization was experiencing major performance issues with their IT infrastructure, which was hurting business processes. And in the healthcare industry, that’s not something to be overlooked. Clinicians were experiencing too much downtime to provide top-of-the-line patient care, not to mention the lack of support and control the company had for their current environment.

In dire need of change, Salem Health overhauled their data center with the Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), powered by Intel® Xeon® processers. The transition was cost-effective – saving the business 68 percent in IT expenses – and provided enhanced data replication, decreased downtime, and greatly improved network access.  As a result, Salem Health is able to deliver much better care to patients, and the business is back on track.

Read Salem Health’s full story, which is featured in the latest edition of Unleashing IT.

Authors

Adrian den Hartog

Senior Marketing Manager

Field Marketing US Commercial

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Our Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data has been gaining momentum as a viable platform for enterprise big data deployments. The newest addition to the portfolio is EMC’s new Pivotal HD™ that natively integrates Greenplum MPP database technology with Apache Hadoop enabling SQL applications and traditional business intelligence tools directly on Hadoop framework. Extending support for Pivotal HD on Cisco UCS, Satinder Sethi, Vice President at Cisco’s Datacenter Group said “Hadoop is becoming a critical part of enterprise data management portfolio that must co-exist and complement enterprise applications, EMC’s Pivotal HD is an important step towards that by enabling native SQL processing for Hadoop”.

Built up on our 3+ years of partnership with Greenplum database distribution and Hadoop distributions, the joint solution offers all the architectural benefits of the CPA including: Unified Fabric – fully redundant active-active fabric for server clustering, Fabric Extender technology – highly scalable and cost-effective connectivity, Unified Management – holistic management of infrastructure through a single pane of glass using UCS manager, and High performance – high speed fabric along with Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Servers powered by Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 series processors.  Unique to this solution is the management integration and data integration capabilities between Pivotal HD based Big Data applications running on CPA and enterprise application running on Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers connected to enterprise SAN storage from EMC or enterprise application running on integrated solutions like Vblock.

The Cisco solution for Pivatol HD is offered as reference architecture and as Cisco UCS SmartPlay solution bundles that can be purchased by ordering a single part number: UCS-EZ-BD-HC – rack level solution optimized for for low cost per terabyte and  UCS-EZ-BD-HP – rack level solution offers balance of compute power with IO bandwidth optimized for price/performance.

soultion bundles

For more information see:  Cisco Big Data SmartPlay Solution Bundles and Common Platform Architecture (CPA) for Big Data.

Cisco UCS Common Platform Architecture Version 2 (CPA v2) for Big Data with Pivotal HD and HAWQ

 

Authors

Raghunath Nambiar

No Longer with Cisco

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Over the past 2 months  or so, I’ve been blogging on Cisco Domain TenSM, Cisco Service’s framework to guide you on your path to data center and cloud transformation. We are just over half way through the discussion on Cisco Domain Ten, so I thought it worthwhile, especially for anyone reading about this concept for the first time, to write a quick refresher and summary of the articles I’ve written so far.  So forgive the brevity and please do dive into the links/URLs for more information if indeed you missed these articles first time. And if you’ve read every article – thanks!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnLFReBBV7c

 

Continue reading “Cisco Domain Ten – The Story So Far”

Authors

Stephen Speirs

No Longer at Cisco