Year: 2015

April 21, 2015 2 Comments
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Cisco’s First Transparency Report on Law Enforcement Requests for Customer Data

As Cisco’s products and services evolve to new models, we find ourselves coming in contact with our customer’s data more regularly. We approach this role as stewards of this data with our customers interest foremost in our mind. One area of widespread interest as it relates to this data is how we interact with Global Law Enforcement regarding this data.   To that end, today Cisco is launching its first global Transparency Report on Law Enforcement Requests for Customer Data. In this report, Cisco details our principles regarding how we will treat law enforcement requests for customer data if, and when we receive such requests. We also provide specifics regarding how many requests we have received from global law enforcement agencies for our customer’s data.

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Anthony Grieco

SVP & Chief Security & Trust Officer

Security and Trust Organization

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Should women consider a career in cybersecurity? Absolutely!

With the United Nations’ International Girls in ICT day fast approaching on April 23rd, this is a great opportunity to discuss how we can get young women involved in careers in technology. Cybersecurity is an ever-present issue with companies and individuals suffering attacks daily. At Cisco, we believe that protection from threats does not rely on a single technology or solution, it incorporates both the processes and of course, the people. It is predicted that by 2017, an additional two million security professionals will be needed, but what many young people – particularly women – underestimate, is how rewarding and far-reaching a career in cybersecurity can be.

Taking, the UK as one example, cybersecurity employs 40,000 people and is worth £6 billion to the economy. Yet according to the Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report, more than one million positions for information security professionals remain unfilled around the world. What’s more, is that female cybersecurity staff only account for 11 percent of the global workforce. In Europe, the figures are even worse, coming in at only 7 percent .

Today there still remains a notion that IT is a “man’s job”. Women thinking of applying are often dissuaded as they may lack the confidence needed at the very start to pursue this career path. Yet, not only is this job market growing, but these jobs pay higher than other industries. We must do what we can to encourage young women to be fearless and pursue these fields of study, because they add new perspectives in the workplace that benefit business outcomes.

Continue reading “Should women consider a career in cybersecurity? Absolutely!”

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Monique Morrow

CTO-Evangelist

New Frontiers Development and Engineering

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Bringing Up a New Branch Site the Easy Way with Prime Infrastructure – Part 4

Last week, I went through application assurance with Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Today, as the 4th post of a 5-part blog series, I’ll go into troubleshooting for your branch site with Prime. Again, as a quick recap, here’s my blog series on how to set up networking with Prime for a new branch site.

WAN deployment – blog 1
Converged wired and wireless  – blog 2
Application performance – blog 3
Troubleshooting – (this blog)
Network health – blog 5		  steve song blog 4 pic 1

By now, your new branch site is in perfect condition with Cisco IWAN, wired and wireless Converged Access, as well as application assurance all working as designed. But you need to be prepared to start troubleshooting if something goes wrong. Every user who runs into network issues means productivity loss.  Every minute of a down network causes a significant amount of business loss. Fortunately, Cisco Prime Infrastructure gives you many tools, so you can achieve speedy problem resolution and provide outstanding user experience.

Here’s a Prime troubleshooting success story that a customer told me. It’s a hospital in Dallas, Texas. Keeping their wireless network running was a critical business priority because the medical staff depended on it for communications and patient care. One day, nurses reported intermittent wireless problems in a room. You know, intermittent problems can be hard to troubleshoot. When you are ready to diagnose the problem, the symptoms may or may not exist anymore. Using Prime, their networking team was able to narrow down to a laptop which was always present when the wireless problems occurred. As it turned out, it was doing heavy and unauthorized live streaming which hogged the wireless bandwidth. The owner was immediately notified to stop streaming. Problem solved and case closed. Continue reading “Bringing Up a New Branch Site the Easy Way with Prime Infrastructure – Part 4”

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Steven Song

Business Manager

April 20, 2015 4 Comments
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Interop 2015 : ITD is Best of Interop finalist

 

ITD (Intelligent Traffic Director) has been selected in Top 3 finalists in the Best of Interop 2015 Data Center category. ITD Delivers:

  • $2 Billion TAM disruptive technology: This technology innovation disrupts today’s $2 Billion TAM for load-balancers, redirection and clustering solutions
  • 100x Scale improvement: The high-end load-balancers today can handle about 200Gbps traffic. ITD can load-balance 20Tbps traffic.
  • 1000x cost-savings for customers: A 40Gbps L4 load-balancer costs about $200k to customers. ITD provides multi-Tbps load-balancing for a fraction of the price.
  • Zero Latency: ITD performs load-balancing, redirection, NAT and access control, all in one-clock cycle in hardware, hence it introduces zero latency.
  • 10x OPEX savings : Order of magnitude reduction in configuration, and ease of deployment
  • Overall CAPEX savings : Wiring, Power, Rackspace and Cost savings
  • 70+ customers interested in deploying within 1 month of shipping.
  • 10x High availability : N + M redundancy, health-monitoring and automatic failure handling
  • $15 Billion install-base can be leveraged: The technology has humongous market capture potential. It works on existing hardware. $15 Billion install-base of Nexus switches is able to use this technology.
  • 30+ patentable ideas: ITD has unprecedented innovations.

Cisco ITD (Intelligent Traffic Director) is a hardware based multi-Tbps Layer 4 load balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on Nexus 9K/7K/6K/5K series of switches. It supports IP-stickiness, resiliency, NAT, (EFT), VIP, health monitoring, sophisticated failure handling policies, N+M redundancy, IPv4, IPv6, VRF, weighted load-balancing, bi-directional flow-coherency, and IPSLA probes including DNS. There is no service module or external appliance needed.

BOI15_Finalist_stacked_728x90

ITD has a lot of different types of use-cases. Some of these are:

  1. Create a multi-Tbps Firewall
  2. Create a multi-Tbps Video-cache
  3. Firewall/IPS/IDS/WAF load-balancing.
  4. Web Server load-balancing
  5. Application server load-balancing
  6. Replace WCCP. Redirect and Load-balancing traffic to Web-cache, WAAS, WAE
  7. Traffic steering to VDS/video-cache/Professional Media Network devices
  8. Load-balance to Hadoop/Big-data cluster.
  9. load-balancing to mobile equipment
  10. Load-balancing to Layer 7 load-balancers
  11. Replace legacy features such as ECMP, port-channel, PBR, etc

Recording of the presentation

 

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Samar Sharma

Intelligent Traffic Director for Nexus 9k/7k/6k/5k

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Cisco Nexus 1000V Now Supports VMware vSphere 6.0

Following up on my blog post announcing our intent to support VMware vSphere 6.0 environments with Cisco Nexus 1000V, I am happy to announce that we now have the supported release available for use.

Starting with release 5.2(1)SV3(1.4), Cisco Nexus 1000V for vSphere will support VMware vSphere 6.0 environments.  Customers can download the release on Cisco.com portal for Nexus 1000V for vSphere.

Cisco Nexus 1000V for vSphere, Hyper-V and KVM environments is continuing to be sold and supported by Cisco.  If you have an expiring VMware support contract for Nexus 1000V, please contact your Cisco account team about continuing product support through Cisco support organization.

Check out the video below for more in-depth discussion about Cisco Nexus 1000V support across multiple hypervisors and attend our webinar on April 21st 2015.

Video: Cisco Nexus 1000V – The Right Choice for Virtual Networking Environments

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Balaji Sivasubramanian

Director, Product Management

UCS

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Focus Magazine Explores the Future of Energy

If you could look into the future and get information about when your car might break down, or your water heater leak, you would probably find it very helpful. The information would allow you to take care of any potential problems before they actually develop. Many industries are now taking advantage of this kind of predictive knowledge, made possible by sensor technology, which allows for remote monitoring of assets. Continue reading “Focus Magazine Explores the Future of Energy”

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Kirsten Chiala

No Longer with Cisco

The Network

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4+1 Practices for Effective Lifelong IT Learning (Part 2)

Happy with how you go about learning, or wish you could learn more, learn more quickly, and even just do it? Today’s post continues what was begun in the previous post, namely a list of good practices to consider to improve how you go about learning throughout your IT career.

The previous post set up the issues, and made two broad suggestions:

  • Continuously learn more about learning and study, practice what you learn, and improve
  • Research and improve note-taking skills for each type of notes you take

Today’s post adds two more practices to the list, with a renewed request that you add your suggestions as well. Today, we’ll examine one type of short-term tactical goal setting with SMART goals, plus a much-neglected study activity: thinking about what you already studied.

3) Start Each Week w/ Achievable SMART Goals

Have you ever finished a week with this thought?

“I failed to make as much progress as I would have liked to make with what I’m learning right now.”

Many factors, both controllable and uncontrollable, affect whether we meet our goals. This next practice helps us achieve our short-term goals by setting and reviewing SMART learning goals weekly, every week.

WO-Cisco-2015-03-fig4 Continue reading “4+1 Practices for Effective Lifelong IT Learning (Part 2)”

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Wendell Odom

Founder, Certskills

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Cisco at Microsoft Ignite 2015. We’re getting the cloud back together…

Cisco and Microsoft’s relationship is growing stronger year over year. Our technologies, products, and integrated infrastructure solutions continue to provide an optimum Data Center for your Microsoft workloads.

Now, this isn’t my first time going to Tech Ed, ooops I mean Microsoft Ignite, however, it is a special year for me! I will be presenting “Top 10 Reasons to Migrate from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012R2 with Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)” on Monday May 4th 6:50pm during the welcome reception in Lounge A. If you are there, please come watch and meet the experts who will be joining me at the show.

Here is a sneak peak:

http://instagram.com/p/05sc27tNiq/

Need more 3 reasons to come see us?

  1. This year we have lots of great demos and theater presentations for you, such as Cisco UCS Mini, Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V, Cisco InterCloud Fabric (ICF).The latest and greatest demo is Application Centric Infrastructure , which will be highlighted in a presentation, “Microsoft Cloud Meets Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)” on Tuesday 1:30pm.

Continue reading “Cisco at Microsoft Ignite 2015. We’re getting the cloud back together…”

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Renee Yao

No longer at Cisco

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usNIC inside Linux containers

Linux containers, as a lighter virtualization alternative to virtual machines, are gaining momentum. The High Performance Computing (HPC) community is eyeing Linux containers with interest, hoping that they can provide the isolation and configurability of Virtual Machines, but without the performance penalties.

In this article, I will show a simple example of libvirt-based container configuration in which I assign the container one of the ultra-low latency (usNIC) enabled Ethernet interfaces available in the host. This allows bare-metal performance of HPC applications, but within the confines of a Linux container.

Continue reading “usNIC inside Linux containers”

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Christian Benvenuti

Technical Leader

CSPG UCS System Engineering