Year: 2015

January 6, 2015 Leave a Comment
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IT Automation Eases the Cost of Doing Business

The increasing pace of business is creating high demand for IT efficiency and speed.

IT directly affects your ability to respond correctly and quickly to new opportunities.  Slow IT equates to slow business.

The latest release of Cisco UCS Director allows IT to automate the deployment of infrastructure delivering the speed and efficiency IT needs in order to support business demands.

Not familiar with Cisco UCS Director?  Briefly, this solution reduces data center complexity by replacing manual provisioning tasks with unified automated workflows that span compute, network, storage and virtualization.  But this solution doesn’t manage just Cisco products.  It unites Cisco UCS-based integrated infrastructures and third-party hardware solutions into a single management view to ensure maximum IT efficiency.  Heterogeneous management is just one of the features that makes Cisco UCS Director different.  You can learn more by going here. Continue reading “IT Automation Eases the Cost of Doing Business”

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Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure Extends Market Leadership

Last month, Cisco added the VersaStack solution to our integrated systems portfolio. The new VersaStack solution leverages Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure with IBM Storwise V7000 storage. Cisco continues to partner with both leading and emerging storage technology vendors to deliver solutions built on Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure. Customers want choice. By choice, we mean that Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure is available with many different storage vendors, including NetApp, EMC, HDS, IBM and Nimble. In other words, the customer doesn’t have to switch storage vendors, they can continue with their current storage or mixed storage vendors and gain the surprising benefits of Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and UCS Director. We realize customers have technology preferences and administrative skill sets that may lead them to a specific solution. Customers also want to seamlessly implement the latest and greatest technology with minimal risk. Cisco’s strategy is to provide that choice with our latest innovations and back it up with Cisco Validated Designs to ensure a faster and more reliable infrastructure deployment.

Our strategy is clearly working – IDC recently released their Q3CY14 integrated infrastructure quarterly tracker and Cisco is the leader in the integrated infrastructure segment with the top two solutions, Vblock and FlexPod, being based on Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure. Vblock and FlexPod have a combined 45% market share! Cisco’s market share is even greater when we add in the participation of Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure with Cisco Solutions for VSPEX and the Unified Compute Platform solution. Emerging storage vendors, Nimble Storage and Pure Storage, also build integrated systems leveraging the innovation and leadership provided by Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure.

In fact, hyper-converged infrastructures such as Simplivity and StorMagic are also leveraging Cisco UCS. Customers want to accelerate and simplify the deployment of IT infrastructure. This is a common customer pain point that is driving the market for both hyper-converged systems and integrated systems. The choice between the two comes down to performance, scale, manageability, and enterprise data management requirements. The great news is that Cisco UCS integrated infrastructure can be a common platform for both integrated and hyper-converged systems.

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Tim Stack

Product Marketing Manager

Data Center and Compute

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Responsive Security in Action

In 2013, our internal Information Security team carried out a series of controlled anti-phishing exercises. The purpose was to raise employees’ awareness of potential spear phishing attacks through emails. Spear phishing has been a common first step for Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks to gain access to a user’s system before launching further attacks at internal targets. As such, if employees are vigilant against such attack patterns, we should effectively reduce the risk of successful APT attacks involving email phishing.

Through a series specially designed phishing emails executed over the four quarters, at one to two emails each month, the team captured an average “click” rate of 26%. The lowest click rate was 5%, and a highest was 61%. However, month over month, there was no discernible trend, as some months were low and others suddenly shot up. What was the data telling us? Did the users’ awareness rise or remain indifferent because of this exercise?

Continue reading “Responsive Security in Action”

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Meng-Chow Kang, PhD, CISSP, CISA

Director and CISO

APJC region, Cisco Systems, Inc

January 5, 2015 Leave a Comment
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Miercom Report: High Availability and Real-time Applications

The transition to 802.11ac has been swift.  Two months ago, Cisco announced crossing 1 million units sold for 802.11ac.  It’s a testament to just how pervasive Wi-Fi has become.  These days, Wi-Fi needs to always be available, aMiercom Performance Verifiednd it needs to be quick, no matter the mix of applications on the network.

Miercom recently published a third-party report testing these two areas – high availability and real-time voice / video performance of Cisco, Aruba, and Ruckus.

Continue reading “Miercom Report: High Availability and Real-time Applications”

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Wes Purvis

Technical Marketing Engineer

Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Group

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SDN and NFV Use Cases in EPN

My last post reviewed some of the building blocks of SDN (Software Defined Networking) and positioned the protocols and APIs (Application Programming Interface) into categories so that the multitude of technologies associated with SDN can be positioned in a coherent framework. This month I’d like to start looking at some use cases where some of these things are used to deliver benefit in a service provider network.

I will review a consumer oriented offering and next month, one targeted at enterprise services.

As always, it is important to define the business outcome we are trying to affect when making a change to the network infrastructure. This case will consider an operator Continue reading “SDN and NFV Use Cases in EPN”

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Chris Lewis

Product Manager

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Cisco Virtualized Video Processing makes it easy to whip up a full menu of multiscreen services

What if cooking worked like video processing? By that I mean, what if every dish you made required separate, dedicated tools and processes just for that dish? So if you’re making a main course for a dinner party, you break out your Main Course knives and kitchen utensils, your Main Course pots and pans, and cook on your dedicated Main Course stove. Adding a vegetable? Grab your Vegetable cutlery, your dedicated Vegetable spices and olive oil, and head over to your dedicated Vegetable stove. Don’t forget dessert. You’ll need a separate set of Dessert mixing bowls, Dessert pots and utensils, and a dedicated Dessert cooktop. (Hope you have a lot of cupboard space.) Thankfully, cooking doesn’t work like this. You can use the same kitchen and cookware to produce every dish you’ll need. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for traditional video processing. Even though you’re often using the same ingredients (video content), each different video application “workflow”—rendering video to stream to a particular portable device, encoding live TV for video-on-demand consumption, adding a new 4k channel to your lineup— Continue reading “Cisco Virtualized Video Processing makes it easy to whip up a full menu of multiscreen services”

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David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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A Broad Partner Ecosystem is Pivotal To Delivering the Total Customer Experience

Many highly successful companies have a common characteristic- their customer care strategy is supportive of, and in alignment with, their corporate brand strategy, often driving to provide a consistent customer care experience, irrespective of the channel used for customer engagement.

Customers’ expectations and demands are growing and changing rapidly. Customers today are different from yesterday. They want to be helped quickly, efficiently, and on their terms. Businesses must learn to successfully deliver against these customer expectations.

Cisco’s broad partner ecosystem plays a pivotal role in helping businesses achieve these desired outcomes. This includes delighting their customers, and winning (and keeping) new business. Cisco collaborates every day with hundreds of established partners who have a wealth of experience and expertise in the customer care industry and our solutions. As trusted advisors, Cisco’s channel partners are positioned to deliver unique value-add services.

Along with our partners, Cisco makes tremendous investments in our partner ecosystem and our shared momentum continues to build. We recently hosted Cisco Customer Collaboration Sales Summits in the Americas and in Europe, bringing together over a thousand partners, developers, and Cisco sales experts to learn and share best practices. Continue reading “A Broad Partner Ecosystem is Pivotal To Delivering the Total Customer Experience”

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Chris Botting

No Longer with Cisco

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Capture New Business Opportunity with Effective Automation

The connections between your business success and data center efficiency have never been clearer or stronger. Delivering data center resources quickly to capitalize on new business opportunities or projects is a major factor for business success. The only way to expedite resource delivery is by replacing manual processes with repeatable, best-practice-based automated service consumption and delivery.

So what is getting in the way?

The first problem is inconsistent delivery of standardized infrastructure instances. Many solutions on the market today only manage virtual resources while others just support their proprietary hardware stack. Automation needs to be across all layers – and that includes networks. I believe the only way to achieve the speed and efficiency businesses desire is to manage your entire heterogeneous data center as a unified whole — holistically. Continue reading “Capture New Business Opportunity with Effective Automation”

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Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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Build your Ark – prepare for the GPU VDI flood!

Its been 9 months since we first discussed VDI 2.0 and the evolution of how and why GPU is becoming a necessary piece of a modern VDI environment. If you missed that blog, have a look here to catch up on this exciting transition. There have been many confirmations of this shift over the last several months but none as exciting or enabling as the early access program for vSphere 6 and VMware’s first stab at NVIDIA GRID vGPU. As a refresher, GRID vGPU is what many would consider the “Holy Grail” of GPU and the primary purpose of the NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology. By physically partitioning the GRID cards, you get the best of scalability and performance without the overhead of technology like vSGA or the limited scale of pass through GPU’s.

As you probably know, Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop have supported vGPU for a little over a year. It was amazing to see staunch vSphere environments start to implement XenServer just to get access to the benefits of GRID vGPU. This appears to have caught VMware a little off guard as they are typically the first to enter new innovative spaces with the vSphere hypervisor. As a result of Citrix beating VMware to the punch on GRID vGPU, work on GRID vGPU shot to the top of priorities at VMware. Who wins in this punch/counter punch contest of GRID vGPU? WE ALL WIN! Competition drives innovation and in this case, very timely innovation.

So lets talk about the early access program for vSphere! Oh… I almost forgot – the restrictions on the early access program prevent discussion outside the people that are part of the early access program. So unfortunately there isn’t much we can discuss specifically about the program, but we can discuss its inevitable impact. vSphere is the leading hypervisor, NVIDIA is the leading GPU enabler for VDI and Cisco is the leading enterprise compute platform that just launched the C240 M4 with the latest Intel Haswell E5-2600 v3 series processors. NVIDIA‘s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) is March 17-20 and VMware is indicating that vSphere 6 should be available around then. You couple all of this with some exciting things that Cisco is working on relative to Compute and GPU’s (maybe an announcement at GTC.. J )… the perfect storm is brewing for sure. Learn more about NVIDIA GRID vGPU here:  http://www.nvidia.com/object/virtual-gpus.html

 

 

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Shawn Kaiser

Consulting Systems Engineer

Data Center