Year: 2014

May 20, 2014 1 Comment
Avatar

How To Fast Track to Fast IT – The ACI Keynote

On Wednesday May 20, at 8:30am join us for Fast Track to Fast IT: Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure keynote (GENSK-1109).  This keynote features some of the heavy hitters in Cisco strategy talking about the direction of Cisco’s Enterprise Networks and Data Center technologies. 

Speakers include Robert Soderbery, Soni Jiandani, and Scott Clark who are, respectively, SVP/GM Enterprise Networking Group, Cisco, SVP Insieme Networks, and VP Advanced Services, Data Center and Cloud Architecture, Cisco.  Check it out in person or online!

Software Defined Networking (SDN) holds the promise to transform IT operations across data center, access, wide area networks (WAN) and the cloud. Cisco’s approach to SDN, Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), takes SDN a step further to provide an architectural framework to address these operational challenges and more.

What if you could deploy enterprise applications in hours, not weeks? What if you could manage and roll out enterprise applications that incorporate network and security policies in real time? What if you had visibility and control across your entire enterprise infrastructure – to provision, deploy, monitor, optimize and troubleshoot easier, faster, and more securely? With Cisco ACI, you can have all this – and more.

Find out how by joining Soni Jiandani, SVP Insieme Business Group, Rob Soderbery, SVP/GM Enterprise Networking Group, and Scott Clark, VP of Cisco Services, as they provide an overview on Cisco’s ACI strategy, roadmap and solutions. Hear directly from customers deploying these solutions. See how Cisco ACI deploys application-centric policies to simplify infrastructure operations by mapping enterprise business logic and automating network provisioning across data center, access, and WAN. The result? A simple, smart, secure solution that delivers on the promise of Fast IT.

Hope to see you there!

 



Authors

Avatar

Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Why CXOs Must Get Moving When It Comes to Mobility

With the frenzy that comes with new phone releases, the excitement that new app launches cause, and our increasing ability to establish connections with anyone virtually anywhere, it’s safe to say the Internet of Everything (IoE) is changing everything about our global network.

And while the Internet of Everything describes the connections that link people, places, process, data and things, the convergence of all of these elements is the source of its growth.

On their own, increased mobility, enhanced cloud and Fast IT are changing the business and IT landscape. A new model for IT that accounts for the convergence of these technologies is essential to accelerating the trajectory of the Internet of Everything to new heights.

Mobility has especially emerged as a key factor, with 25 billion devices estimated to be connected to the Internet by 2015. For this reason, tracking (and staying ahead of!)  top mobility trends remains a priority for every organization. Continue reading “Why CXOs Must Get Moving When It Comes to Mobility”


Authors

Avatar

Brett Belding

Senior Manager

Cisco IT Mobility Services

Leave a Comment
Avatar

California Department of State Hospitals (DSH) Shares the Power of IoE to Enhance Security at CiscoLive!

Today, the California Department of State Hospitals shared our story about the power of technology to deliver a safer work environment during a roundtable discussion at Cisco Live!

During the session, I discussed the unique security challenges our organization faces in balancing its charters to provide hope and support to adults with serious mental illness working toward achieving personal recovery, while also committing to providing a safe, secure, violence-free environment for patients, staff, visitors, and the community.
Continue reading “California Department of State Hospitals (DSH) Shares the Power of IoE to Enhance Security at CiscoLive!”



Authors

Avatar

Jamie Mangrum

CIO at California Department of State Hospitals

8 Comments
Avatar

Deliver High Performance Cloud Services with the new ASR 1001-X

At CiscoLive this week, I am proud to announce the launch of the new Aggregation Services Router, the ASR 1001-X.

photo 1The ASR 1001-X is the latest addition to the ASR 1000 family of routers that packs 20Gbps forwarding capacity and 8G of Layer 3 Crypto  throughput in a compact 1RU form factor!

In my earlier blog post I highlighted the need for connecting data centers to share and scale cloud services on demand and achieve flexibility and availability that is required by the cloud. As data centers continue to grow so does the need for more power and cooling, while rackspace continues to become a rare commodity. Talking to customers they wanted a platform with a smaller footprint but with higher performance and hence the ASR 1001-X was born. 

Some of the key benefits of the ASR 1001-X we are highlighting at CiscoLive are:

  • Investment Protection: Pay-as-you-grow forwarding throughput upgradable from 2.5 to 5,10 and 20Gbps
  • Robust Security: Up to 8Gbps of Suite-B encryption combined with Layer 2 MAC Security.
  • Data Center Interconnect (DCI): For workload mobility, high-availability application clusters and layer 2 extension for legacy applications support.
  • Cisco IWAN: Application Visibility and Control, AppNav and Performance Routing enable inexpensive business-class Internet links as a WAN transport
  • Advanced Routing: Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) to enable Host mobility, Ingress traffic load-balancing, high VPN scale, and IPv6 transition
  • Route Reflector: Up to 13M IPv4 routes (selective download)
  • Multimedia Edge: Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) Enterprise Edition to offer 16k calls
  • Ease of Management: Seamless integration and management with Cisco Prime Infrastructure.

I am often asked how each one of the benefits will help our customers so I wanted to talk about some of the common use cases where customers will see the largest benefit of the ASR 1001-X. For this blog I will cover in detail the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) use case and I will cover more use cases in future blog posts.

The Data Center Interconnect must provide secure access to satisfy a key requirement for the consumption of services from the cloud. Before the advent of the cloud, the network traffic that flowed in the interconnecting network fabric or the IP NGN was unidirectional – it flowed from the client to the server in the network and back to the network client. Cloud and virtualization has made the network traffic multi-dimensional. The network traffic not only moves to and from client and network server it can also move across servers that are located in geographically dispersed data centers that are interconnected using DCI technologies. VMware virtual machine motion is an example of that. Based on this criteria, the ASR 1001-X supports the following DCI technologies:

  • Virtual Extensible LAN Services
  • Overlay Transport Virtualization
  • Virtual Private LAN Services
  • Ethernet over MPLS
  • Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol v3

Please stay tuned for more in my next blog. I will talk about how the consumers of the cloud require the same great application experience when services are moved to the cloud and how the ASR 1001-X can help to deliver a better user experience.

 

 



Authors

Avatar

Muhammad Abid

Senior product Manager

Enterprise Networking Group

1 Comment
Avatar

Cisco Live Utilities Session a Big Success: Converging IT and OT (Operational Technologies) – BSAIoT-2100

rgeiger2Rick Geiger presented Session BSAIoT-2100 – How to Successfully Converge IT and OT (Operational Technologies) at Cisco live in San Francisco this week, with strong interest from attendees.

Many of you know of Rick Geiger from this blog and other publications. Rick’s session at Cisco Live 2014 discussed the many aspects and challenges of merging OT and IT in organizations.  Computing and networking for operations requires more IT-based support and a growing convergence of IT and OT skill sets to support intelligent devices and varied processes. Rick’s session discussed the convergence driven by the critical needs of the OT organization for the process maturity of IT and for managing and securing the growing complexity of OT systems.

Rick Geiger CLUS AgendaIn bringing IT processes & capabilities to OT, IT will need to recognize the needs of critical control systems and the equivalent process capabilities that OT provides for engineering and operations. Successful companies will find ways to establish common ground & combine the expertise & value of both. Bringing standalone devices or isolated networks into core operational systems will bring clear and tangible advantages and business benefits to those companies.

Rick’s session topic covered new ideas & concepts that are developing around IT/OT, providing major opportunities for those who understand how to leverage their IT know-how to Operations.

Missed it? Well you can download the slide deck here:

BSAIoT-2100 – How to Successfully Converge IT and OT (2014 San Francisco) – 1 Hour, Rick Geiger (requires registration)

Let us know what you think!

(Find out more about convergence by reading Rick’s series of blogs, starting with: Energy Networking Convergence Part 1 – The Journey From Serial to IP)



Authors

Avatar

Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

6 Comments
Avatar

Python code from UCS PowerTool

I have been out of college for almost 25 years and have been programming ever since.  However I was a programmer before I graduated, I was a programmer when in 7th grade I got to bring home a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), for a week at a time. I thought that everyone would want to bring it home, I got to school early every Friday morning to signup to bring it home the next week. Turns out I was always the only one in line. Then my dad bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000, and I was hooked.

Oddly enough I started out studying engineering in,1984, I didn’t think that my computer hobby was a pursuable major. In most classes I just felt I didn’t get it and those around me did, maybe engineering was not for me. Then I took my first programming course, Fortran, I got it, but very few others did, it was then that I realized that I was a programmer.

In “The Mythical Man Month” by Fred Brooks, in the very first chapter, The Tar Pit, there is a description of the joys of the craft and it captured why I program, perfectly.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

Written in the 1970s, I couldn’t believe how succinct and right on-target was the statement. My early languages were C, Pascal, PL/1, ada. And after I graduated C++, Java, and object oriented programming became the rage. I did come to like Java and augmented my programming skills with Perl and was perfectly happy to continue along with those, that was until I met Python

I’m not the kind of person to get into debates about what programming language is better and why.  I’m an average guy programmer, if it works, great! And Python works great.
Continue reading “Python code from UCS PowerTool”



Authors

Avatar

John McDonough

Developer Advocate

DevNet

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Innovation Across the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already started to transform the world—and it is the next big wave of growth in our industry. At the edge of the network, devices are becoming more intelligent, and gateways are enabling the efficient, secure transmission of data by connecting legacy and new infrastructure to each other and to the cloud. As these “systems of systems” proliferate, the volume of data available for analysis multiplies exponentially. The software-defined datacenter is becoming increasingly important as it provides economies of scale for big data storage and analytics—and the importance of keeping that data secure from device to datacenter is paramount. A holistic approach that integrates hardware, software, and services is crucial for developing IoT in the coming decade.

Collaborators in Innovation

At the center of this transformation is a new ecosystem where industry leaders join forces to enable real-world use cases and deliver greater value to customers. Together, Cisco and Intel are committed to delivering innovation across the IoT spectrum—from devices at the edge to datacenters on the backend, and everything in between. This shared end-to-end vision for IoT closely aligns scalable Intel architecture with Cisco’s portfolio of multi-service edge products, powering the Internet of Things across a wide variety of industries. Continue reading “Innovation Across the Internet of Things”



Authors

Avatar

Doug Davis

Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Internet of Things Group (IOTG)

Leave a Comment
Avatar

April 2014 Threat Metrics

April kicked off with a 1:292 rate of malware encounters and closed with a rate of 1:315. Highest peak day was April 20 when the rate reached 1:177. Lowest was April 4 at 1:338. The median rate of web malware encounters in April 2014 was 1:292, representing a slight improvement over the median of 1:260 requests in March but still worse than the median of 1:341 requests in February.

Apr2014rate-300x184

Continue reading “April 2014 Threat Metrics”



Authors

Avatar

Mary Landesman

Senior Security Researcher

Cisco TRAC

Leave a Comment
Avatar

Cisco UCS and ACI Infrastructure Innovations for Big Data at Hadoop Summit

Big Data remains one of the hottest topics in the industry due to the actual dollar value that businesses are deriving from making sense from tons of structured and unstructured data.  Virtually every field is leveraging a data-driven strategy as people, process, data and things are increasing being connected (Internet of Everything). New tools and techniques are being developed that can mine vast stores of data to inform decision making in ways that were previously unimagined.   The fact that we can derive more knowledge by joining related information and recognizing correlations can inform and enrich numerous aspects of every day life.  There’s a good reason why Big Data is so hot!

Hadoop Summit

 

This year at Hadoop Summit, Cisco invites you to learn how to unlock the value of Big Data. Unprecedented data creation opens the door to responsive applications and emerging analytics techniques and businesses need a better way to analyze data.  Cisco will be showcasing Infrastructure Innovations from both Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and Cisco Applications Centric Infrastructure (ACI).  Cisco’s solution for deploying big data applications can help customers make informed decisions, act quickly, and achieve better business outcomes.

Cisco is partnering with leading software providers to offer a comprehensive infrastructure and management solution, based on Cisco UCS, to support our customers’ big data initiatives.   Taking advantage of Cisco UCS’s Fabric based infrastructure, Cisco can apply significant advantage to big data workloads.

Continue reading “Cisco UCS and ACI Infrastructure Innovations for Big Data at Hadoop Summit”



Authors

Avatar

Scott Ciccone

Sr. Marketing Manager

Global Marketing