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Dell’Oro just released the Q3 CY2014 SAN Switching Market Share results, and for the second quarter in a row, Cisco came out at #1 in combined FC + FCoE revenue. Only this time, we widened the gap by 9 points! We also took #1 in FC Modular share, with an impressive 11.6% Q/Q share gain. Our FC Fixed share has been growing too, up 8% from a year ago. In all, Cisco has really stepped up its game in SAN Switching.

Cisco market share gains are primarily due to customer acceptance of the MDS product portfolio, ramp up of FCoE-capable products, along with substantial 16G FC demand.  FCoE is supported on MDS, Nexus and UCS providing an end to end architecture enabling customers to reduce cost and simplify operations.  In the recent quarters, customer buying trends also shifted from buying point products to acquiring pre-packaged solutions. NX-OS a single operating system, and DCNM as single management platform to manage across LAN and SAN, resonated well with customers. Cisco‘s architectural approach of combining storage, network, compute and management helps to reduce cost and increase efficiency.

Cisco Storage Networking – Performance, Flexibility and Availability

Cisco Storage Innovation: Over the last year, Cisco has made significant investments in both FC and FCoE on the MDS and Nexus product lines, and we are starting to see those investments pay off.  Last year Cisco introduced a 16G Director (MDS 9710), offering 3x the performance of our competitors’ and also a new Multi Service Platform (MDS 9250i), which we like to refer to as “the Swiss Army Knife” of SAN switching, due to its multi-protocol (16G FC, 10G FCoE, and 10G FCIP ports) and multi-service (SAN Extension, IO Acceleration, and Data Mobility Migration) capabilities. Three months ago we introduced a new compact director (MDS 9706) and a 16G Fabric Switch (MDS 9148S), along with new FCoE enhancements providing customers with deployment choices.

MDS 9000 Family

Continue reading “Cisco Storage Networking market share #1 (FC+FCoE), #1 FC Modular”



Authors

Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

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I’ve finally had a chance to stop and smell the roses. The roses being Cisco ISE 1.3 that is. It’s been a much anticipated update to Cisco’s core TrustSec component and there are a number of improvements, many dealing with Guest users. So what has Cisco done to improve? Let’s look at 5 areas related to Guest access:

1.     End-User Web Portals
2.     Notifications
3.     Guest Portals
4.     Sponsor Portals
5.     Non-Guest Portals

End-User Web Portals

One of the new features that I really like is how the interface has been modified to centralize the portal configuration tasks and customization into a single location. The first thing you notice when you navigate to Configure Guest Access and Sponsor Access is that the interface is designed to make life easy. Three steps to Guest Access are overviewed and each step is clearly identified. We don’t usually find this information in the user interface. Normally we’re looking for this in an End User Guide or a Lab Guide for one of the courses I teach. So, in my opinion, this is a fresh new approach to making a complex device like ISE much easier to use.

ise-guest-access

Continue reading “Cisco ISE 1.3: Welcomed Improvements”



Authors

Brandon Carroll

President and CEO

Global Config Technology Solutions, Inc.

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Like any service organization, museums are looking for innovative ways to gain insight in consumption patterns, to better optimize resources and to improve the guest experience.

The Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) solution helps organizations use their network as a platform, to derive analytics that can be used to better understand how guests with mobile devices  use and interact with a venue. These types of insight can allow venues like museums to optimize their operations and deliver a better experience  to their guests.

Continue reading “Modern Art Goes Wireless With Cisco Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX)”



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ginaBy Gina Nienaber, Marketing Manager

We’ve been discussing the Evolved Programmable Network for some time now, knowing the transition from an IP NGN to an EPN is not something that will happen overnight (See EPN Blogs 1 , 2, 3). The Cisco® Evolved Programmable Network (EPN), represents an idea, an end-to-end unification of network, storage, and compute elements, and a lofty concept for existing multivendor networks to aspire to. New entrants into the communications industry are capitalizing on this period of evolution by building homogeneous end-to-end networks purpose built for SDN and NFV innovation.

One recent entrant is RST Fiber, based in North Carolina. Earlier in the year, Cisco and RST announced their 100 Gbps network deployment covering over 3000 miles throughout North Carolina with plans to Continue reading “RST Fiber’s High-speed Network powered by Cisco’s Evolved Programmable Network”



Authors

Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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Today, Cisco is filing two lawsuits to stop ARISTA’s repeated and pervasive copying of key inventions in Cisco products. These suits cover key Cisco proprietary patented features and Cisco’s copyrighted materials.

Our action is based on the principle that to compete in technology, you need to innovate, not copy.

Please read Mark Chandler’s Blog  for additional information.



Authors

Bruce Klein

Senior Vice President

Worldwide Partner Organization

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In the thirteen years I’ve been General Counsel of Cisco, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve initiated suit against a competitor, supplier or customer.

It’s therefore only after thoughtful and serious consideration that we are today filing two lawsuits to stop Arista’s repeated and pervasive copying of key inventions in Cisco products. These suits cover key Cisco proprietary patented features and Cisco’s copyrighted materials.

(The patent lawsuit can be viewed here. The copyright lawsuit can be viewed here.)

Cisco’s $6 billion annual R&D expense, supported by over 25,000 engineers, has a proven track record of bringing innovation to our customers and partners around the world. Our success is built on using our innovation engine to lead in the marketplace. Our action today is based on the principle that to compete in technology, you need to innovate, not copy.

We have taken this action only after assuring ourselves of four key facts – all of which form the basis for legitimate intellectual property actions between competitors:

  • Arista incorporates features knowing that Cisco holds intellectual property rights related to those features, all of which are Cisco proprietary and none of which are industry standards
  • Arista intentionally markets those features to its customers as a basis for buying the products
  • Arista promotes its copying to convince investors to finance the company
  • Arista’s actions, if unstopped, will embolden others to seek to do the same

Patented Featured Copied

The heart of our action regards Arista’s deliberate inclusion in its products of 12 discrete and important Cisco features covered by 14 different U.S. patents. All of these features are being used by Cisco currently and in products we ship to our customers. None of the implementations are incorporated in industry standards. They were patented by individuals who worked for Cisco and are now at Arista, or who at Cisco worked with executives who are now at Arista. These Cisco-created features and implementations are incorporated by Arista in their entirety into Arista’s products.

  • System Database (“SysDB”) (Arista uses Cisco’s networking device implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,162,537)
  • Zero-Touch Provisioning (“ZTP”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,290,164)
  • On Board Failure Logging (“OBFL”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No.7,340,597)
  • Control Plane Policing (“CoPP”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,224,668)
  • Spanning Tree Loop Guard(Arista uses Cisco’s implementations covered by Cisco Patent Nos. 7,460,492 & 7,061,875 )
  • In-Service System Upgrades (“ISSU”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation described by Cisco Patent No. 8,356,296)
  • Virtual Port Channels (“vPC”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No 8,051,211)
  • Access Control ListsImprovements (“ACL”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent Nos. 7,023,853 & 6,377,577)
  • Private Virtual Local Area Networks (“Private VLANs”) (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent Nos. 6,741,592 & 7,200,145)
  • Generic Command Interface (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,047,526)
  • CLI Command Data Translation (Arista uses Cisco’s implementation covered by Cisco Patent No. 7,953,886)

Continue reading “Protecting Innovation”



Authors

Mark Chandler

Retired | Executive Vice President

Chief Legal and Compliance Officer

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The week of November 10 was filled with learning and excitement for security technology enthusiasts at Cisco’s Bangalore campus as people gathered for SecCon-X 2014, Cisco’s largest annual cross-company security conference. The event scaled in scope and content compared to last year, starting with a dedicated customer engagement event, and was followed by two days of conference activities, including 21 presentations and 2 panel discussions by a varied mix of speakers and panelists from industry, academia, and Cisco. All the sessions were packed with 250+ participants and 350+ IP TV viewers each day, which was proof of how the Cisco community in Bangalore relished the event. The huge buzz around the vendor expo booths and the poster walls was heartening to see.

What was new this year?

  • 11 boot camp and training sessions on a wide range of security technology topics.
  • The Customer Engagement Event was a huge success with 20+ customers participating in the event, which enabled Cisco to communicate our vision, demonstrate our solutions, and hear from customers on the challenges they faced in the evolving threat landscape.
  • Events like Hack Your Device (7 teams filed security defects on various products), Capture The Flag (116 participated and 10 captured all the flags), and a Lunch & Learn session for Cisco Women in Cyber Security, were well arranged and much appreciated by all attendees.


Authors

Sashank Dara

Engineer Technical Lead

Security Technology Group

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Network customers have always bought networks for one and only one reason: to run their applications over them.  Yet for most of that time, those networks have been largely oblivious to the composition of the network traffic they carried.  Traditional network tools could tell you whether your network was having a lot of errors, or whether a given link or interface was congested, but they couldn’t tell you what was congesting your network, beyond the limited granularity of a few well-known ports.  Finding out that you’ve got a lot of HTTP or HTTPS is not very helpful in finding out whether you’re swamped by personal traffic that needs to be controlled, or by legitimate business traffic that requires an increase in effective bandwidth.

Continue reading “What’s In Your Network? And What Are You Going to DO About it? Call Vodafone!”



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As the holiday season gets into full swing, executives like you are polishing off strategic and operational plans for the New Year. For many manufacturing companies, 2014 was a good year, for some outstanding, and most manufacturers are optimistic for more of the same in 2015. According to MAPI’s US Industrial Outlook, “manufacturing will continue to grow faster than the overall economy,” with 2015 growing at a higher rate than 2014.

Because manufacturers are looking to get ahead of this growth curve and set the stage for competitive differentiation and advantage in 2015, you are utilizing budgets remaining from 2014 to make smart investments now in new technologies, before the year comes to a close. With strategic investments in operations or R&D/engineering, companies position themselves to be more agile, productive and competitive while the economy slowly but surely continues to strengthen. In an Industry Week report, “Manufacturers are optimistic about their businesses as well as the economy as a whole, and are investing accordingly … Following a profitable growth strategy, they are controlling costs while introducing new products, increasing sales from existing customers, and leveraging data to make smarter business decisions.”

In recent conversations with a few of my Cisco colleagues who happen to be 20+yr Manufacturing / OT (Operations Technology) veterans, these industry gurus describe how they counsel manufacturing clients during the transitional holiday season. Steve Gansen points out that for many companies, budgets need to be expended this calendar year-end (‘use it or lose it’), which presents a great opportunity to change the prioritization for projects. “Many of my customers see this as an opportunity to reprioritize projects and drive budget to improve R&D or product engineering and offerings.” (His comments reminded me of the Sub-Zero’s innovative investments in their product development, NPI and processes.)

Jim Fledderjohn and Dwayne Edwards add that there are other considerations for a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) proof-of-concept (PoC) projects for production environments and engineering programs that present incremental, re-directional opportunities at year-end. From video surveillance to energy management, to factory wireless and plant virtualization, there are many compelling use cases that can be easily ‘piloted’ to deliver immediate business outcomes and measurable ROI. In fact, an option recently announced at Automation Fair is Cisco Services Factory Starter Kit, a fast-track, turnkey PoC package of wireless capabilities for your plant environments.

Jim further describes, “Piloting an IoT project on a small scale lets manufacturers test out a concept in their environment and puts them in a better position to win budget and additional investment in 2015.” Particularly in the US—where according to the latest ISM Report On Business for November, the manufacturing sector expanded for the 18th consecutive month—momentum in the industry just keeps building. And considering manufacturing technologies that include embedded intelligence and IoT, according to the Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT), orders for 2014 are showing growth of >5%.

Are YOU planning end-of-the-year investments in IoT? Let us know what you think in the comment block below. Thanks for reading.



Authors

Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing