Year: 2014

November 18, 2014 3 Comments
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Have questions about Hybrid WANs? Quiz the Cisco Geeks!

These are just a few of the many questions that were asked on the webinar ‘How to Deliver Uncompromising Branch Application Performance‘:

  • Would DMVPN also allow me to easily integrate networks using multiple MPLS providers?
  • Is there a specific router model, IOS required for a PfRv3 branch controller and master controller?
  • Can you explain how the direct spoke-to-spoke routing is accomplished when using DMVPN?
  • Is using BGP with DMVPN scalable? Wouldn’t we have to define each neighbor?

Continue reading “Have questions about Hybrid WANs? Quiz the Cisco Geeks!”



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Kiran Ghodgaonkar

Senior Manager, Enterprise Marketing

Intent-based Networking Group

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Innovation for Every Type of Customer Expands Partner Opportunities

One year ago at Cisco Collaboration Summit 2013, we set out on a mission to bring amazing collaboration experiences to every room, every desktop, and every pocket. We’ve had an incredible year delivering simple and affordable collaboration technologies leading up to Collaboration Summit 2014 this week in Los Angeles. In addition to yesterday’s news, today, the innovation continues as we announce two new Business Edition collaboration solutions for businesses of every size. Designed for partners to take to market, these packaged collaboration solutions make it easier for you to sell, deploy, and manage.

Collab Summit Quote_McLeod 880x440 v2

Packaged Collaboration for Every Size Business

The new Cisco Business Edition 6000S is designed for smaller deployments – up to 150 users – while meeting all your customers’ essential collaboration needs. It’s preconfigured with five unified communications applications and built on a cutting edge router, yet can seamlessly migrate to full-scale collaboration platforms. No other vendor offers an integrated router, server and gateway for this market segment, which provides an enormous competitive edge for you. Continue reading “Innovation for Every Type of Customer Expands Partner Opportunities”



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Richard McLeod

No Longer with Cisco

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Reversing Multilayer .NET Malware

This post was authored by Dave McDaniel with contributions from Jaeson Schultz

Recently, we came across a malware sample that has been traversing the Internet disguised as an image of a woman. The malware sample uses several layers of obfuscation to hide its payload, including the use of steganography. Steganography is the practice of concealing a message, image, or file within another message, image, or file. Steganography can be used in situations where encryption might bring unwanted attention. Encrypted traffic from an unusual source is going to draw unwanted attention. Steganography allows malicious payloads to hide in plain sight. It also allows the attacker to bypass security devices. In our sample malware, steganography is used to decrypt and execute a second dropper, which in turn installs a user-land rootkit to further hide its intentions. The rootkit adds another layer of obfuscation by installing a DarkComet backdoor, using RC4 encryption to encrypt its configuration settings and send data to its command and control server.

Continue reading “Reversing Multilayer .NET Malware”



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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

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An Engineer’s Thoughts on Work/Life Balance

Several months ago I became so busy with work that I subconsciously compiled a script that auto-executed every time someone asked any question vaguely resembling, “How have you been?”.  I didn’t have time to think of a human answer, so without hesitation, the canned response “busy” would sound from my lips.

Work Life Balance2Often times we get so busy with work we become robotic, and even worse – we forget to live.  The funny thing is, by the time we realize it, rather than making some significant change, we just keep working to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable truth.  As we strive to stay current with the evolution of technologies, certifications and the world around us, we quickly become overwhelmed, placing our wellbeing and sense of self at risk.  We have a thousand things going on at work, two thousand things to catch up on, a hundred books to read, tests to take, projects to complete, deadlines to meet, and, oh yeah, an entirely separate life to live with family and loved ones, plus housework, hobbies and so on, all with a phone screen glued to our eyes, constantly checking email and social media.  It’s quite an amazing feat to take on such a loaded life and remain happy. Continue reading “An Engineer’s Thoughts on Work/Life Balance”



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David Varnum

Network Engineering

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Innovation Can Come From Anywhere

Innovation can be an overused word, but it’s a hot topic for a reason. The pace of change compels businesses, large and small, to reinvent themselves.

Cisco’s innovation strategy is multifaceted and focuses our efforts both internally and externally. Last week we announced a new Cisco IoE Innovation Center in Tokyo. This is the seventh IoE Innovation Center that Cisco has opened worldwide – joining Rio, Toronto, Berlin, Songdo, Barcelona and London. Our IoE Innovation Centers enable us to co-innovate vertical solutions with regional customers, partners, governments, universities and startups.

Another way Cisco stimulates innovation externally is through Grand Challenges. We sponsored three this past year and received over 1,000 entries across the globe, proving that innovation can come from anywhere.

It gives me great pleasure to announce a new Grand Challenge that is very close to my heart. I am passionate about advocating for women in STEAM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics), and I speak often about the advantages that women bring to technology leadership as it becomes more multidisciplinary. Cisco officially launches the IoT World Forum Young Women’s Innovation Grand Challenge today, and winners will be announced next year in May 2015. This program is designed to encourage young women to drive innovation in IoT and promote their interest in STEAM fields. We understand that it is critical to cultivate interest in STEAM fields early on and we are excited to recognize their talents.

Join me in getting the word out and encouraging young women in your lives to believe in themselves and participate in this Grand Challenge!



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Padmasree Warrior

Chief Technology & Strategy Officer

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Nimble Storage extends Adaptive Flash Platform with 16G FC, more deployment options

As customers continue to look for points of differentiation in their markets, the Storage Area Network (SAN) continues to play a vital role in enabling businesses to adopt new technologies and applications to help them grow.  To provide the highest reliability, scalability, and performance, organizations have traditionally deployed Fibre Channel (FC) storage networks and many will continue to do so.   FC is still a  preferred choice for enterprises (large and small), and the market transition from 4/8 G to 16 G is the best proof that the FC market is still strong.   Ethernet-based Storage solutions are also gaining mindshare and some of our customers desiring a unified data center fabric use Ethernet-based Storage protocols to reap the benefit of convergence.

We are sometimes asked about how Cisco MDS products will support the latest generation of storage technology on the market, namely flash.   Industry influencers have asked us if SAN technology will continue to be relevant as these newer memory technologies gain market share.  Can SAN technology cope with the increased performance and workload consolidation enabled by flash-based arrays?

Our answer is a resounding “Yes”: SAN solutions are here to stay.  No matter the underlying storage components, it is still very important for customers to be able to manage enterprise-level storage requirements centrally, and to optimize storage delivery.   Cisco is committed to working with third-parties to ensure that our MDS SAN technology interoperates with leading edge storage technology, and we have certification programs in place to ensure smooth deployments for customers.

The most recent example of this industry collaboration is with Nimble. To support varying storage requirements, Nimble on Nov 18th announced its support for FC SAN on their Adaptive Flash platform; now customers have the choice of  iSCSI Ethernet-based storage or FC. Unique application requirements lead to application specific infrastructure needs and Cisco, along with Nimble, provide over 450 joint customers with differentiated solutions tailored to address customer needs.

Highlights of  announcement

  1. Nimble CS300, CS500 and CS700 series arrays offer both iSCSI and FC protocol support
  2. Nimble completed a beta program with more than 40 enterprises; Customers have purchased and deployed FC arrays in production environments.
  3. Introduced  expanded capacity providing ability to scale non-disruptively up to 1.5 PB of raw capacity and up to 128TB of flash per cluster

Continue reading “Nimble Storage extends Adaptive Flash Platform with 16G FC, more deployment options”



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Tony Antony

Marketing

Solutions

November 17, 2014 3 Comments
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What Is the Cisco Collaboration Cloud?

Today at Collaboration Summit, we announced a bunch of really exciting stuff: the IX5000, the Project Squared client, and the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. This third announcement is a big one for me personally. I have invested a lot of my time and energy working on the Cisco Collaboration Cloud with the collaboration team.

So, what exactly is it? Simply put, Cisco Collaboration Cloud is the server-side software that powers the Project Squared client. But, it’s also a whole lot more than that. We see the market going through a substantial transition around cloud and mobile. We knew this required us to place a big bet on the technology platform that would help us leapfrog through this market change. Cisco Collaboration Cloud, or C3 for short, is one of those big bets.

Iteration

The first thing we needed was a software platform in the cloud that would deliver a fantastic user experience. More important, we needed to build a platform from which we could continuously evolve and improve the user experience. The reality is that it’s incredibly hard to just sit in a room, think about how the product should look, ship it to customers, and be completely right – on the first try. Unless you are Steve Jobs, you need to iterate based on feedback.

The best client experiences in the market today are powered by cloud platforms that iterate incredibly quickly, with new software pushes in the cloud on a daily basis. Doing that is hard. It requires software that is capable of hitless upgrades (meaning, no downtime when doing an upgrade). And it requires tons of automation for everything from testing to deployment.

So, we built all of that. Iteration is a key tenet of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. But frankly, iteration is almost table-stakes in modern cloud software design.

Security Continue reading “What Is the Cisco Collaboration Cloud?”



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Jonathan Rosenberg

Cisco Fellow and Vice President

CTO for Cisco's Collaboration Business

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How I Manage a $4B Business from my Phone

I don’t use my laptop to run my business.

It’s not that I don’t like my laptop. It’s just that I really love using my mobile device — for everything. My mobile is incredibly convenient, small, and functional. Let’s face it: we’re lucky to be in the era of the smartphone when one device can do almost everything. And best of all, I actually can run my business with just this device.

Two years ago, when I started at Cisco, it was not possible for me to run my business with a smartphone. Something was missing. I used email and SMS and voice/video on my phone, but it wasn’t quite enough. I realized that I needed one place to stay connected to the work we were doing and to stay connected to the people I needed to work with. And do it both in real-time, and non real-time.

That need is pretty obvious to other people too, as it now seems every week there is a new messaging app targeting mobile workers like me. What all of these apps are missing is a way to connect real-time collaboration with non real-time conversations. Most of these apps treat this problem as an afterthought, but we didn’t. So while everyone is running in one direction, we’re going a different way. A better way.

Today, I’m excited to tell you that Cisco has developed that very tool and we launched it today: Project Squared built on our new Cisco Collaboration Cloud.

Project Squared is our brand-new enterprise business collaboration application. Continue reading “How I Manage a $4B Business from my Phone”



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Rowan Trollope

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group

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The Most Sophisticated Collaboration Experience on the Planet

When we said that we strive to deliver “no-compromise” collaboration experiences, nowhere did we mean it more than with our latest endpoint product. Today culminates 24 months of refreshing our endpoint portfolio as we unveil our flagship triple-screen immersive system, the Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series. We tweaked all the levers to deliver a visually stunning, technically powerful, and feature-rich experience. And we made it more affordable so that you can deploy it far beyond the traditional boardroom. The IX5000 is a beauty — powerful and dynamic with all the bells and whistles, plus an incredible experience. Sound like a finely crafted sports car? In a sense, it is.

Imagine: A sleekly sculpted system finished in Oslo white with three 4K ultra high-definition cameras clustered discreetly above three 70-inch LCD screens. The cameras provide crisp, high-definition video. Theater-quality sound emanates from 18 custom speakers and one powerful sub-woofer.

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We achieved this with a single H.265 codec that delivers more horsepower than anything before it. The purpose-built codec: Continue reading “The Most Sophisticated Collaboration Experience on the Planet”



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Snorre Kjesbu

Senior Vice President/General Manager of Webex Devices

Meeting Room Systems