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CiscoChampion200PXbadge#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’re talking about UCS and Big Data with Cisco Technical Solutions Architect Sean McKeown.

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Sean McKeown, Cisco Technical Solutions Architect

Cisco Champion Guest Hosts
Brad Haynes, @GK_bradhaynes, Client Solutions Specialist
Chris Nickl, @ck_nic, Cloud Infrastructure Architect
Stewart Goumans, @WirelessStew, Mobility Consultant Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 33: does this rack server make my data look big?”

Authors

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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OK, using data to make decisions to streamline operations is not a new concept, but the resources and types of data that we have at our disposal is unprecedented. Gone are the days when we had to rely on data only available in the data center. There are new exciting ways to sift through terabytes of data to proactively predict problems before they impact service, optimize your IT and application infrastructure and gain an end-end view of operations.

Today there are more and more applications, devices, users, and tasks. They are generating a large amount of structured and unstructured data at the edge of the network. The net result is the old – read 5 years ago — centralized approach is no longer sufficient enough to guarantee true operational efficiency.

Let’s talk about some of the technology break-throughs and solutions that are driving this:

  • On premise Hadoop offerings are replacing high cost Multi Parallel Processing (MPP) Platforms.
  • Customers are now leveraging NoSQL Databases with Hadoop to uncover analytics from live interactive data to create operational analytics platform.
  • Security solutions are now focusing on meeting the challenges presented by the Internet of Things (IoT) that addresses concerns over malicious intruders and malware.
  • Business users and data scientists are now able to easily and iteratively derive insights from the unstructured data.

Continue reading “Pssst, IT Operations Analytics Is Actually Cool”

Authors

Jim McHugh

Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Unified Computing Systems

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Skills such as IT management and software development have become intricately interconnected as new digital architectures enable new technologies. As a result, tech companies are innovating increasingly advanced and sophisticated solutions to meet the demands of a services-rich environment.

Collaboration environments, rich media and cloud services delivery models are examples of the many new drivers that are changing the way we operate. The massive influx of data from the growing Internet of Things is what really dictates the new requirements for the IT infrastructure: transaction times, transaction security, customer data protection, just-in-time offerings and more.

A shift in career strategy

The combination of rich architectural offerings and quickly changing business needs is creating unprecedented opportunities across the business spectrum. However, it is also placing a knowledge burden onto an evolving IT workforce, whose mandate is to become more and more focused on adding business value to their organization. What really matters is what we get from the new technology in practical terms, rather than how interesting or amazing the technology is. A good technology architect now has to be able to clearly explain the value proposition of his or her solution.

In response to this transformation, IT professionals will need to shift the way that they plan and operate their careers. New technologies are shaping the workforce of the future, and the skills needed to meet the demand of our new digital age can be built on your current foundational skill set, no matter if you come from the IT world, the services world or the software development world.

Tomorrow’s IT professionals will be comprised of an organized blend of all skill sets and will be capable of providing top-notch support, no matter which vertical they are attached to. Continue reading “New IT Career Strategies for a Dynamic Technology Ecosystem”

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Antonella Corno

Senior manager of product strategy, Learning@Cisco

Learning@Cisco

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Recently I had an opportunity to sit down with Thomas Raabo, Network Operations Manager of Zitcom, a premier partner-driven hosting company based out of Denmark. Thomas and his team address companies and applications of various sizes, and were one of the early adopters of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). At the time of my conversation, they had this architecture in production for almost 10 months.

Thomas’s take on it was quite interesting. When I asked him to compare the before vs. after scenarios with Cisco ACI, he shared some insights –

  • Time to market dropped from hours to minutes (applications, VMs were deployed much faster)
  • Making firmware upgrades (usually a challenge for any NetOps person), became “kid’s play”.
  • Application teams are better integrated with the network team and have access to the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) if they want to. This helps reduce silos.
  • Interestingly, programmers without network knowledge are able to program into networks rapidly deploying new services

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQXLcUFBu0

Continue reading “Hosting Provider Zitcom Accelerates Time to Market with Cisco ACI”

Authors

Shashi Kiran

Senior Director, Market Management

Data Center, Cloud and Open Networking

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Last week, I posted about our Project Thor, our effort at creating a royalty-free next-generation video codec. This post generated lots of comments – which is great! But also illustrated that there is a lot of confusion about what it means for something to be open. I’d like to remedy that here and describe the four dimensions of open. Yup, four.

Dimension 1: “Open as in Open Source”

One dimension of open is whether the technology is available in open source form. Typically this means that the source code is available and that there is a license associated with it wherein the owner of the code makes it available for usage, distribution, and modification within other projects without charge. Cisco is typically favors the BSD license. It’s important to note that open source licenses are really about copyright: They tell you whether or not you can include this code in other projects and distribute it. Whether it really costs nothing overall — that’s the next dimension.

HAI68265Dimension 2: “Open as in Free”

The second dimension of open is whether the technology can be used in a form that does not require payment. Where things get interesting is when a piece of code implements something that is patented. In such a case, it may not actually be free to use the technology, because you need to pay a patent royalty fee to the patent owner. It’s totally possible for code to be open source (Dimension 1) but not free (Dimension 2). A great example of this is x264. This is an open source project – indeed available under the GPL license – but because H.264 utilizes patented technologies, any company that ships a commercial product using it has to pay patent license fees to the patent holders, in this case the MPEG-LA consortium. As a side note, the GPL license attached to x264 would also require a commercial product to open source its own code; but that’s a separate matter. Continue reading “The Four Dimensions of Open”

Authors

Jonathan Rosenberg

Cisco Fellow and Vice President

CTO for Cisco's Collaboration Business

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Cisco has always followed a philosophy of giving back to the community, and in recent years, Cisco China has participated in various community and volunteer programs including: Hands on Shanghai (HOS), River of Hearts (ROH), One Heart Gift Bag, Hiking for One Egg, etc. Giving makes a difference, and with lots of love and warm hearts, “Helping Others” is not just a slogan at Cisco, but a way of life for all Cisco employees.

This summer, prior to the Dragon Boat Festival, the Greater China Talent Acquisition Team participated in a volunteer program which was organized by “Green Food Bank” NGO. We delivered Festival greetings and food to those elderly and poverty-stricken families in Tang Qiao community, Shanghai of China. We were extremely excited to take part in this event!

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This Give Back Day was part of a global initiative, where the Talent Acquisition team as a whole volunteered all on the same day.

Cisco is a pioneer in Giving Back and we are dedicated to the cause. We are connecting the unconnected with our technologies and products, and we also link with people by our love. Previously we did, at present we are doing and in the future we will do it better.

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Authors

Sarah Shen

ASEAN Recruiter

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Screen Shot 2015-08-27 at 11.23.24 AMIn my last blog post, I talked about the business outcomes customers are looking to achieve when evaluating SD-WAN solutions. However, if you are going to invest in an SD-WAN solution, it is also important to think about the trends that might impact your WAN and remote sites in the next few years. Are you prepared for trends like digital disruption or the Internet of Things (IoT), which are transforming businesses and creating new sources of competitive advantage?

Today’s leading businesses are constantly reinventing themselves to disrupt the market, and they are using the latest technology to do so. Businesses that want to accelerate their digital transformation and stay ahead of the competition need a dynamic network that enables constant reinvention, all on demand. Organizations will need fast IT capabilities that accelerate business innovation through IT simplicity and insights.

Traditional WANs have been built for static applications and are managed using multiple management tools that make it difficult for IT teams to reconfigure and troubleshoot the network when responding to business needs. Solutions for moving to hybrid WAN by augmenting your network with lower-cost connectivity like the Internet, or improving application experience and security, are a first step but still tend to be a static solution.

Continue reading “An SD-WAN Bill of Rights”

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Jason Rolleston

Sr. Director of Product Management

Cisco's Connected Mobile Experience (CMX)

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The future fascinates me. I grew up reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. And watching every sci-fi movie that came out. Robots, aliens, utopia, dystopia – I loved it all. Today, imagining what the future looks like is a big part of my job.

In June, I got to participate in a futurist session at Cisco Live where I had to make one prediction about what the year 2025 would be like. (See Ambient Computing below or watch the recording at 31:31.)

Now I have the chance to speak about the “Intelligent Future” at SXSW Interactive 2016 with my friend Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot (maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot). Our panel, “Robots Taking Over at Work: Why It’s a Good Thing,” is in the running for the event. If you’d like to hear why we think robotics and augmented reality are on their way to the workplace, take a minute to vote using the SXSW Panelpicker.

I believe the world of tomorrow will be dramatically different from today.  Here are some of the futurist concepts that have been knocking around in my head lately:  Continue reading “What Future Do You See?”

Authors

Rowan Trollope

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group

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Some people like to say that you can’t ever fail an exam. I understand why someone would say that but I don’t agree. If you don’t make the cut, you have officially failed the exam. That does not mean you’re a failure or that you’re not a smart person.

Certifications test the minimally qualified candidate, those who make the cut score pass the test. The value of certifications and the methods of testing can certainly be argued but this post is not about that.

I took the CCDE written at Cisco Live and barely missed it. This came as a surprise to me. I felt well prepared and confident when entering the testing area. After the test I felt like many candidates that have just failed an exam. “I can’t believe I got that much of topic X”, “This question is way too subjective” and so on. This post describes how to handle that negative energy and how to work on passing it the next time. Continue reading “Certification exams – learning from failure”

Authors

Daniel Dib

Network Consultant

Guest Blogger