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The August 12 issue of Forbes magazine features Cisco’s investment to fuel job creation and economic development in the Palestinian information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

Cisco CEO John Chambers on the cover of Forbes
After visiting Ramallah in 2008, Cisco CEO John Chambers pledged to help develop the ICT sector in the Palestinian Territories.

“We do this because we want to change the world. And we don’t do it on a small scale. It’s nice to help a village, but the key is how do you help a country?” Cisco CEO John Chambers says in Forbes.

In 2008, Cisco began outsourcing projects from its Israeli office to three companies in the Palestine Territories. Those firms have since reported a 65 percent increase in their workforces.

Forbes contributor Richard Behar writes, “Cisco’s efforts created a ripple effect, bringing in other American tech giants, which also use their Israel offices to work across the border. And as U.S. companies got Palestinian companies comfortable with working with entities based in Israel, large Israeli tech companies have been able to establish relationships, too. … HP now outsources some of its research and development to the West Bank. Microsoft Israel has started putting Palestinian engineers in Ramallah on its payroll.”

Indeed, according to a June 2012 report on the Palestinian Investment Commitment by Mission Measurement, Palestinian ICT firms reported a 64 percent increase in international client work from 2009 to 2012.

Cisco ultimately contributed US$15 million to the initiative, including millions of dollars in incubation, venture capital, and equity funding for ICT companies, and a capacity building program for entrepreneurs.

Read the complete Forbes article featuring Cisco’s Palestine Investment Commitment.

In a separate piece, Behar describes Cisco’s Tamkeen.net capacity building program for Palestinian entrepreneurs, which provides training and mentoring for CEOs and managers. Behar attended two of the training sessions “in rooms filled with Palestinian CEOs and mid-level managers being coached by Israeli Jewish tech experts.” Seventy Palestinians from 24 different companies have participated in 100 days of trainings since 2011.

Read about the Tamkeen.net capacity building program in Forbes.

The video below features Tareq Maayah, founder of Ramallah-based Exalt Technologies, one of the three companies that undertook outsourcing work from Cisco.



Authors

Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

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Released along with the Wireless Release 7.5 earlier this month was the latest version of Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX), continuing Cisco’s leadership in the emerging field of WiFi location based services and analytics. Release 7.5 delivers a rich set of innovations to enhance the existing Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution.

This is a very exciting new release delivering many new features and functionality to the solution. Here is a brief summary of the highlights from the release:

CMX Analytics:

Version 7.5 continues ongoing improvements to the existing analytics capabilities such as improved usability, enahnced ‘look and feel’, as well as easier to generate analytics results and increased support for complex building layouts. In addition, the user interface and the appearance of the 3D interface has improved to display clearer information enabling a better understanding of the visitors to the venue.

cmx7.5.1 Continue reading “Cisco CMX Solution – Version 7.5 Released”



Authors

Brendan O'Brien

Director Global Product Marketing

Connected Mobile Experiences

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One feature of the usNIC ultra-low latency Ethernet solution for the UCS Cisco VIC that we think is interesting is the fact that it is based on SR-IOV.

What is SR-IOV, and why is it relevant in the HPC world?

SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) is commonly used in the server virtualization world. The most commonly described purpose of SR-IOV in the hypervisor world is to allow a device partition, called VF (Virtual Function), to be mapped in the guest operating system address space. This allows the guest operating system to enjoy higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization as compared to the alternative: software-emulated devices that are traditionally implemented in hypervisors.

Compared to the old world before hypervisors came along, that use of SR-IOV seems to allow to regain back some performance lost due to the hypervisor software intervention in the I/O data path. But why should I care about SR-IOV in the world of my network-latency-bound HPC applications running on common operating systems on bare metal servers?

Continue reading “Why is SR-IOV relevant in the HPC world ?”



Authors

Cesare Cantù

Manager of Software Development

UCS Platform

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This is the latest in a series of posts featuring partner success stories where partners share how they’re helping customers achieve their goals by using Cisco technology. This week we’re featuring Richard G. Twilley, CenturyLink Vice President, Business Markets Sales, Eastern Region.

Imagine you’re anticipating the holidays and shopping for the children in your life. You, of course, have a smartphone in your hand.  When you realize you’ll face a crowded line just to take home the hottest toy of 2013, you simply tap your phone’s screen to put the toy on layaway.

Now think about the technology and the data crunching required to push personalized coupons, suggested shopping lists, location-based sales, news and information to smartphones. Retailers are harnessing Big Data and mobility to develop stronger relationships with customers.

With technology evolving faster than ever before, and the increasing sophistication and complexity of a modern network, more companies, retailers among them, are turning to managed services and the cloud to deliver transformational solutions that enhance the customer experience and drive profitability.  Continue reading “Partner Voices: CenturyLink Helps Retail Customers Drive Profitability Through Managed Services, Cloud”



Authors

Anna Sui

Social Media Strategist

Global Partner Marketing, Cisco

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As cloud technology and organizations mature, customers are shifting their focus from the provisioning of individual servers to richer cloud-based application platform stacks. Why? Servers usually do not exist as standalone entities but are designed to run something tangible for the business. For example, multi-tier application platform stacks have in their design multi-server elements such as database, application and web servers.

In this era of the cloud, creating golden templates for each of the elements required to configure these multi-tier stacks and the servers they reside on, is not only unwieldy for IT to maintain and manage but they are monolithic. This means if one single element changes, the whole golden image needs to be revised. Golden images are not configurable and frequently require additional manual configuration to complete installation.

What’s the solution? It begins with the concept of DevOps.

DevOps is a software development method that permits better collaboration between software development and IT operations in a way that these multi-tier application servers can be consumed in the cloud without human intervention. There are a number of disciplines included under the DevOps category, but this blog will be focusing on configuration management.

Puppet and Chef are two of the leading configuration management vendors in the DevOps segment delivering the following benefits:

• Elastic and continuous configurations
• Increased productivity to handle hundreds to thousands of nodes
• Improve IT responsiveness by reducing time to deploy changes
• Eliminate configuration drift and reduce outages

There is a lot of buzz about this capability. How much buzz? Watch this video from CiscoLive Orlando.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv96-gSh0ms

Within the next month, Cisco will be releasing a cloud accelerator that delivers configuration management of multi-tier application stacks. Based on the TOSCA-modeled graphical user interface, customers utilize a canvas that simplifies the design of these stacks into templates. Each element: server, network device and storage; is represented on the canvas with a graphical icon. Behind each icon are configuration details for each component. For example, network device configuration may include firewall rules and load balancing algorithms. For servers, Cisco is leveraging Puppet and Chef or home-grown scripts. The result is a blueprint that allows for consumption of the complete application stack by end users, on demand, delivered by the cloud.

So now we have blueprints. Where’s the real advantage?

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) is the golden key that gives you the advantage because it unlocks this new approach to cloud efficiency. Providing blueprints for multi-tier application stacks on their own do nothing if they cannot be ordered by customers from a standardized menu of services and acted upon by an orchestrator to automatically deploy the entire configuration. Extending functionality for DevOps is just another example of Cisco IAC’s ability to go beyond IaaS without requiring a solution rip and replace or major push-ups by customers.

Why just provision servers and continue to increase IT costs with manual “last mile” provisioning?
Cisco IAC and the configuration management accelerator simplify the delivery of multi-tier application stacks through self-service ordering and repeatable delivery. Cloud accelerators are designed to follow the vision and strategy of Cisco IAC eliminating code islands that become problematic when you upgrade to the next generation Cisco IAC edition.

To browse through the current cloud accelerators, go here. First time visitors will need to sign the register.

If you would like to learn more or comment, tweet us at: http://twitter.com/ciscoum



Authors

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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Time is money. And the more time it takes to deploy and provision devices on your network, the more costly it is for your organization.

On August 21, join our experts for a deep-dive exploration of Cisco Prime Infrastructure, a critical part of the Cisco Unified Access solution, and learn how Cisco Prime Infrastructure can speed the deployment and configuration of your unified access environment. Cisco Prime Infrastructure reduces errors and difficult-to-diagnose configuration issues, through a logical, simple-to-use workflow.

During this detailed session, you’ll hear and see a live demo, and learn how Cisco is reinventing the way that network devices are deployed.

As part of the Cisco Unified Access solution, Cisco Prime Infrastructure delivers a single management point of view. It offers comprehensive lifecycle management of wired and wireless access, campus and branch networks, complete visibility into end-user connectivity, and application performance assurance. Continue reading “Easily Deployed Provisioning with Cisco Prime Infrastructure”



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Cisco UCS supports many compute nodes, in a data center there most likely will be more than one UCS system, managing hundreds of compute nodes. These UCS domains will probably have very similar requirements for VLANs, VSANs, vNIC and vHBA templates, Service Profiles templates, boot polices and etc.

Are you tired of cutting and pasting, or clicking until your fingers are calloused over? Are you trying to duplicate or synchronize settings across all your UCS domains? Do you lose track of the changes you made and where? Not to worry UCS PowerTool to the rescue. UCS PowerTool is the Cisco UCS PowerShell Cmdlet library. UCS PowerTool 1.0.1.0 has just been released, download it and make sure to get the release notes and the user guide.

UCS Components and configuration are defined by an XML schema and this schema is used to generate the majority of the UCS PowerTool Cmdlets. However there are a several special Cmdlets that take UCS PowerTool from a great set of cmdlets to a must have cmdlet library for all UCS administrators. The cmdlets I’m focusing on today are Sync-UcsManagedObject and Compare-UcsManagedObject.
Continue reading “Synchronize UCS Objects”



Authors

John McDonough

Developer Advocate

DevNet

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My first DEFCON was DEFCON Three, held at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas.  The computer security conference scene was much, much smaller back then, but DEFCON had already become THE security conference of the year. Since that time I’ve continued to regularly attend DEFCON, and over the years I have collected some very fond memories of summer computer security conventions past.  I remember vividly when the Cult of the Dead Cow celebrated their release of Back Orifice.  I recall battling the Las Vegas heat in the large, “air-conditioned” tents at the Alexis Park Hotel.  I remember when the NBC Dateline journalist was outed at DEFCON after planning to surreptitiously record attendees confessing to hacking crimes.  I remember seeing the authorities hauling away a fake Automated Teller Machine (ATM) that had been installed in the Riviera.  Fun times…

defcon

Continue reading “DEFCON 21 Wrapup”



Authors

Jaeson Schultz

Technical Leader

Cisco Talos Security Intelligence & Research

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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

This week Cisco unveiled details around the popular Value Incentive Program (VIP) 22. A new 90-day grace period, new Cloud Services Reseller Track, and the simplified Express Track are just a few of the changes made to VIP to help make you more successful.

VIP 22 is open for enrollment now until September 6, 2013. Check out the VIP 22 blog post to get details on how to enroll so you can start earning rewards.  Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – August 9, 2013”



Authors

Anna Sui

Social Media Strategist

Global Partner Marketing, Cisco