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I recently wrote a blog titled Blade Server TCO and Architecture – You Cannot Separate Them and thought a little more on the architecture side would be a good thing.

 With so much misinformation (dis-information?) about UCS running around in the ether, I thought the straight forward comparison offered here would be valuable. It is important to dispel myths and analyze reality before making the important decisions around server and networking refreshes / upgrades, which by necessity affect long term data center architecture. I hope you will find this presentation – Cisco UCS, HP and IBM – A Blade Architecture Comparison, useful in your decision making process.

For me, there are three primary drivers that differentiate the Cisco UCS architecture from everyone else’s designs and they can be divided into the buckets below:

You could, and probably should, ask what is left out? That’s pretty easy. I did not specifically call out Performance and TCO, for a good reason. If you can execute on the three bullets above like Cisco UCS does, Performance and TCO are the natural derivatives. You shouldn’t have to target them separately. It’s kind of a “If you build it, they will come” scenario. That’s why I made the statements in the TCO and Architecture blog that “…Server cost is irrelevant (to OpEx) because: changing its contribution to total TCO has a vanishingly small impact….” and “…It [architecture] is the single most important component of OpEx…”   For more on this and how server cost and TCO intersect, please check out this blog – Blade Server TCO and Architecture – You Cannot Separate Them.  It takes a look at the OpEx and CapEx components of TCO, and how altering either of them effects the actual total  3-year TCO.  You may be surprised.

Cisco is providing trade-in credits for customers’ old generation servers and blade chassis,  helping ease the transition and upgrade to a new UCS blade architecture.  The UCS Advantage presentation below has more details on this fantastic program that can further enhance the already compelling TCO benefit of upgrading to Cisco UCS.

Special note: For more on the benefit that Cisco UCS delivers for I/O and throughput, I suggest a great blog by Amit Jain – How to get more SAN mileage out of UCS FI.  Amit does an excellent compare / contrast of FC and FCoE technologies (“…8 Gb FC yields 6.8 Gb throughput while 10 Gb FCoE yields close to 10 Gb throughput…”).



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It was not so long ago that people would often have to make difficult choices about their work. Your dream job might open up 3,000 miles away. Your new job means leading a team on the other side of the world. Your day is spent on the road meeting with customers, not in an office. In the past, working men and women have been forced to choose: Do I uproot my family to take advantage of a new job opportunity that could bring greater financial security? Will I need to travel a majority of the time to effectively lead my team? What will I lose during hours of travel time? Companies faced similar choices: Are we missing out on talent because they are not local? How do we connect different locations and geographies effectively?  Can our dispersed teams be more productive and more connected? If we require an employee to move, do we risk losing the employee? Can we afford the increasing relocation costs?

And then the Internet changed everything.

Continue reading “Collaboration: Changing the Way We Work”



Authors

Blair Christie

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

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Even in the face of the U.S. government shutdown, law enforcement around the world continued undeterred. The 120th Annual International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference and Law Enforcement Education and Technology Exposition will take place October 19-23, 2013 in Philadelphia.

A key event for law enforcement education, IACP 2013 topics will include everything from tracking officer injuries to understanding the power of social media.

One session we are especially excited about will be presented as part of the Chief Executive Track by Chief Todd Miller, Director of Public Safety at the Mankato Department of Public Safety, and his team.

 

This workshop will highlight strategies agencies are using to deal with mass shootings and individual crisis incidents. If you’re attending IACP2013, join this session to learn how to prepare for the resulting media frenzy and develop a community response – Saturday, 10/19/2013 1:00PM – 3:00PM, Room 115AB. Continue reading “Public Safety Blog Series–#IACP2013: Law Enforcement Professionals Unite”



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Day 2 of Educause 2013 has been both information-filled and somewhat fascinating. During the general session this morning, author and renowned game designer, Jane McGonigal, shared some intriguing facts about the power of gaming in higher education. A few facts she shared that I found especially interesting included – 71% of employees are not engaged (at a cost of 300 billion dollars per year), and that the longer you stay in school, the less engaged you become.

Continue reading “Day 2 of Educause 2013: Videoconferencing, Engagement and the Student Experience”



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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When your incident response team gets access to a new log data source, chances are that the events may not only contain an entirely different type of data, but may also be formatted differently than any log data source you already have. Having a data collection and organization standard will ease management and analysis of the data later on. Event attributes must be normalized to a standard format so events from disparate sources have meaning when viewed homogeneously. In addition to normalization, log events must be parsed into fields and labeled in a consistent way across data sources. Ensuring that log data is organized properly is a minimum requirement for efficient log analysis. Without digestible and flexible components, it’s extremely difficult to comprehend a log message. If you have ever paged through screen after screen of log data with no filter, you know what I’m talking about.

Normalization

Data normalization is the process of transforming a log event into its canonical form, that is, the accepted standard representation of the data required by the organization consuming the data. If the same data can be represented in multiple formats, each possible iteration of the data can be considered a member of an equivalence class. To allow proper sorting, searching, and correlation, all data in the equivalence class must be formatted identically.

As an example, let’s consider timestamps. The C function strftime and its approximately 40 format specifiers give an indication of the potential number of ways a date and time can be represented. The lack of an internationally recognized standard timestamp format, combined with the fact that most programming libraries have adopted strftime’s conversion specifications, means that application developers are free to define timestamps as they see fit. Consuming data that includes timestamps requires recognizing the different formats and normalizing them to an organization’s adopted standard format. Other data contained in logs that may require normalization includes MAC addresses, phone numbers, alarm types, IP addresses, and DNS names. These are examples of equivalence classes, where the same data may be represented by different applications in different formats. In the case of an IP address or a DNS name, the CSIRT may find it beneficial not to normalize the data in-place, but rather to create an additional field, the labels of which are standardized across all data sources where possible.

Continue reading “Getting a Handle on Your Data”



Authors

Matt Valites

Information Security Investigator

Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT)

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There are two ways to write this blog. One is all positive, happy and humorous. The other is to be real. I’ve wrote both versions. I like the happy one better. I had some funny, “You know you’re fat when…” Foxworthy-isc quips…oh you silly hillbillies with your cornbread!  but, to my surprise, weight loss is more than just losing weight, it’s personal. Dad gum…is it personal… Therefore, here we go…a real and unvarnished look at how I lost over 100lbs in two years.  By the way…this is a long blog. I’ve subtitled each section so you can skip around if ya wanna.

“How about that! 3 more and that’s a perfect score in bowling! Woot!! Woot!!!” As a Lebowski under achiever, 300 is a magic number. So when my Dr. told me I weighted 297lbs on 10Oct11 heck man, I was happy at my accomplishment! Honestly, as a hillbilly that grew up on a diet of Crisco, Emge lard and deep fried everything and STILL have low cholesterol numbers, I felt great!! Suck it tofu eaters!! I was happy fat. Comfortable in my own skin, I loved to laugh and make fun of leaf eaters, calorie counters…joggers! Get a grip man! Be happy who ya are and enjoy life daddy-o!

My Doctor threw a brick thru my temple of celebration. “Well, let’s see if you cheer this Jimmy Ray… I have to start you on blood pressure pills right  now because you are close to stoke levels (he watched me take two pills right there in his office) and I have to monitor you for self-induced diabetes…”

Wait a minute…WTF…but…none of that runs in my family.

As a matter of fact, about the only thing that really kills off Purser’s are bullets and each other. There must be a mistake. I’m healthy… I AM!!! He flipped over the chart and showed me what every engineer needs to see; numbers and histograms based against a benchmark. Oh crap…jokes on me….who’s laughing now.

But that middle thing…self-induced??! You mean there are folks in this world I know personally that have medical problems they could not help ,they  do not want and go bankrupt trying to cure and I’m so friggen fat and lazy that…I’m inducing them in myself?????????????????????????????????????  Whatta friggen ungrateful piece of crap I am. Given the gift of health and this is what I’m doing with it. Man…Whatta friggen whanker I am.

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Cisco Live Vegas

Continue reading “How An Engineer Looks At Weight Loss”



Authors

Jimmy Ray Purser

Former Co-Host of TechWiseTV

No Longer at Cisco

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DNS is like the town gossip of the network infrastructure. Computers and apps ask DNS questions and you can ask DNS who has been asking to resolve malware domains. When internal trusted systems are using DNS to resolve the names of known malware sites, this can be an Indicator of Compromise and a warning to clean the potentially infected systems and block traffic to the domain.

Blacklisting the known malware domains using local RPZs, firewalls, Cisco IronPort Web Security Appliance (WSA), or Cloud Web Security (CWS) is a great way to add an extra level of security in organizations. But what if you are just getting started in the process of cleaning systems and just need some situational awareness? Or, how can you manually check to see if these devices are working as expected? How can you determine independently of security devices, and at any point in time, that client systems are not reaching out to malicious domains? You can use dig but this post focuses on a Python example. Let’s first take a look at some DNS mechanics.

Continue reading “DNS Knows. So Why Not Ask?”



Authors

Jeremy McGuinn

Customer Support Engineer, Applied Security Intelligence COBC signed

Security Research & Operations

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Partner-Weekly-Rewind-v2Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Off the Top

In the latest Partner Voices blog post, Scott Alexander of Alexander Open Systems (AOS) offered insights on leveraging the SMB market with managed service offerings.

Alexander offers some background on the move by AOS, in 2011, to expand managed service offerings as a means to grow business and expand technology portfolios with current customers. By sharing that information with other Cisco partners he hopes to start a dialogue on your experiences in this space.

Come join the conversation. Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – October 18, 2013”



Authors

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

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Dude, where’s my IP?

I love to check in on social networks like Foursquare and Google+. Most of the time, there’s no point to it, but it’s fun to see what friends and colleagues are up to or discover new local haunts. Despite the fun and games, location is much more important to the network than it appears. My physical location may have little or everything to do with my network location and there’s no reason for them to match exactly, but there are significant reasons to be more accurate.

You Are Here

Continue reading “Check Ins – Why location needs to be part of Authentication and Identity”



Authors

John Spade

Technology Architect