Henry Tam is Sr Product Marketing Manager for F5’s Cloud Solutions and BIG-IP application delivery controller (ADC) platforms (hardware and software). Henry is responsible for the outbound marketing and go to market strategy of these solutions. We are publishing this Blog on behalf of Henry.
Today’s software-defined economy requires businesses to move faster than their competitors. Speed and agility are critical to keeping up with competitive demands for new applications, as well as maintaining existing infrastructure. Because an inability to scale and service networks can lead to escalating costs and increased time-to-service, many IT groups deploy private clouds to help them respond aggressively to business needs. As part of the private cloud initiative, automating the network stack requires a solution that addresses not just the L2-3 switching and routing complexity, but the associated L4-7 services as well—for each application. Not surprisingly then, organizations are looking for a SDN solutions like Cisco ACI that fully integrate with advanced L4 – L7 services, all driven by single app policy and can be orchestrated by higher level orchestration tools like Ansible.
Today, following the introduction of our previous solution package for OpenStack, we’re announcing the F5 Private Cloud Solution Package for Cisco Networking. This package leverages the existing supported and certified APIC integration with BIG-IP through iWorkflowTM and F5 Device Package and now includes the BIG-IP iSeries appliances and Virtual Editions, the advanced application delivery and security software, and F5 professional services, simplifying your procurement and deployment processes. This package has been engineered, tested, and certified to run in Cisco ACI Service Manager (Managed), Network Policy (Unmanaged), and standalone Nexus 9K NX-OS modes. The last two modes also includes deployment architectures that utilize Ansible for orchestration and automated configuration. By supporting multiple modes, F5 allows customers to operationalize the entire network and start migrating to the policy-based, application-driven network architectures or full private cloud, for both existing and new applications. By leveraging this package with Cisco ACI and Ansible playbooks, we provide a full stack orchestratable SDN solution that enables agile and consistent app services delivery, security, all within a DevOps-ready solution that enables collaboration between IT and app owners.
Figure 1: Integrated F5 and Cisco ACI fabric multi-tier architecture
The adoption of cloud-based software defined network solutions like Cisco ACI is accelerating. Now with the F5 solution package, you can confidently deploy a private cloud with Cisco ACI fabric fully integrated with F5 scalable app delivery services delivering the automated policy-driven application deployments you need. Combining the advantages of the F5 and Cisco market leading solutions, organizations can deploy versatile, elastic network and application services—ultimately leading to quicker and more successful application rollouts. Engineered. Tested. Validated. Certified.
Availability of this new solution package will be in calendar Q3 2017.
I’ve led the Networking and Security Business at Cisco for just over a year now. As exciting as it is to release new technologies that ultimately will become the networking infrastructure powering the world’s future disruptors – last week’s intent-based networking announcement for example – it’s the breadth and scale of Cisco’s business that make my job as an engineer in Silicon Valley, a pretty special one.
Every day, I have the opportunity to build innovation for a scope of workloads that spans the world whether it’s running in the campus, data center, cloud or on a device. The network literally has never been more relevant.
The way I see it, the next-generation of networking delivers automation and intelligence with programmable hardware and software – consumed with models that work best for our customers’ workloads. For markets like data center including service providers and webscale companies, our customers have high end automation and scaling demands. We can help them build their networks to meet their optimized specifications through different hardware and software component configurations depending on their needs.
Our collaboration with Microsoft is a great example of how we do that. Cisco and Microsoft have collaborated on adapting Cisco’s NX-OS on Nexus 9500 switches, based on Cisco’s CloudScale ASICs. In addition, Cisco’s Nexus 9200/9300 platforms running Cisco’s Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) will offer customers the freedom to run the network operating system of their choice on SAI-ready Cisco Nexus platforms.
As Yousef Khalidi, CVP, Microsoft Azure Networking said, “Cisco support for the SAI abstraction layer on its Nexus CloudScale switches helps fulfill our vision for SAI to enable rapid innovation in silicon, CPU, power, port density, optics, and speed across multiple platforms while enabling Microsoft and cloud operators to leverage the same software stack across a variety of switch hardware platforms.”
As we continue changing the networking blueprint to intent-based infrastructure – from hardware-centric to software-driven, from manual to automated, and static to dynamic, strong collaboration can lead to a profound impact on business innovation and agility. Cisco is committed to providing even greater customer choice and flexibility for the segments of our business that need it.
Tuesday was another day of talks, tech, and more tech for the 28,000 attendees in Las Vegas, not to mention the even larger online audiences. A stat I heard today: 11,000 of this year’s event attendees are first-time attendees. That’s a lot of new faces at the so-called “summer camp for nerds.”
In the morning technology keynote, Cisco execs Chris Dedicoat, David Goeckeler, and Rowan Trollope set the stage for more discussion into the technology behind the intuitive network — and some of the ways we’ll experience change going forward.
Technology Vision Keynote Goeckeler started with a deeper dive into Cisco DNA in his opening section of the keynote. It’s a combination of intent, context, and learning – all secure. He brought up Sachin Gupta to explore more about Cisco DNA Center, the control center for the entire network, and TK Keanini to dig into the security side of things.
“For over 30 years, Cisco and many of you have been at the core of shaping the internet and unprecedented opportunity.”
Rowan Trollope
Trollope focused more on the impact of the evolving network and how it’s at the heart of the transformation to a new data economy. This new economy is a huge opportunity for every company in the world. The organizations that come out ahead will be those with the most the data – that can then analyze that data and connect it back to action for the business.
As much as we focus on the bits and bytes and elements of technology, Trollope reminded the audience that most people running businesses don’t care about the technology itself – they care about what the technology can do for them. Learn more about Cisco Jasper Control Center 7.0 and the new Cisco Kinetic, the IoT operations platform, in Rowan’s post “The Network for the Next Billion Devices: Cisco DNA Meets IoT.“
The mayor of Las Vegas joined Rowan on stage toward the close of his talk. I’ll just say that she definitely added an unexpected dimension to the keynote.
Catch the full Technology Vision Keynote on demand.
(Goeckeler starts at 14:22 and Trollope starts at 51:30)
In case you missed Monday’s session from Jens Meggers, “The 90s Called, They Want Their Workplace Back,” here’s the replay for you.
Cisco Champions in full force As part of my job, I’m fortunate to be the collaboration lead for the Cisco Champions program. The Cisco Champions are a group of dedicated technologists. Whether from an end customer or partner organization, they’re the people who “get their hands dirty” working with our products every day.
I was fortunate to be trusted with a live microphone to moderate a panel in the World of Solutions today. It wasn’t hard to do: Champions Scott McDermott, Jake Snyder, and Josh Warcop, discussed the pros and cons of generalization vs. specialization when it comes to tech careers. Trust me, these guys know their stuff and had the full attention of a standing-room audience. Bonus: they didn’t kick me off the stage.
Collaboration Partner Village In addition to an eight-foot-tall stuffed bear, this campground themed area within World of Solutions is stuffed with companies that work with our collaboration products. A quick list of who is there to share: 2Ring America, Akkadian Labs, Altocloud, Approved Contact, Arcana Networks, Bucher + Suter, CallPlease, IntelePeer, Jive Communications, Kore.ai, Kurmi, Local Measure, NVT Phybridge, Pegasystems, PromptWorks, QWASI, Synergy SKY, Telstra, Upstream Works, Vyopta, WWT
What’s up for Wednesday?
10:30a PT: Security Keynote: Ensuring the security of data and communications is now a mission-critical priority that dictates broader strategy and investment decisions. Join Theresa Payton, Former White House CIO & Cybersecurity Authority on CBS’s ‘Hunted’, and John Stewart, Cisco’s SVP, Chief Security and Trust Officer.
Visit CiscoLive.com/us to view the full broadcast schedule and for more conference information.
“Live” events are the holy-grail in media and entertainment. Whether it’s live sports, live news, or other live programming, “Live” is the most valuable, most difficult and most impactful type of production that can be done regardless of genre.
Our own version of “Live”, Cisco Live US, is about to take place, with over 27,000 attendees in person and over 200,000 viewers watching online. Cisco Live connects our technology solutions to our customers and partners while showcasing the latest innovation with 4 Keynote presentations, 23 Innovation Showcase sessions, 31 original Cisco stories & sponsor content. Cisco Live also has 78 hours of continuous streaming, including 36 hours of live and 42 hours of replay content pushed to www.ciscolive.com, www.cisco.com, YouTube and Facebook.
At Cisco Live 2017, we are taking the IP innovation in media & entertainment and showcasing it in a couple of ways. First we have created an innovative Media education “track” that many of our customers will get to experience, which will explore topics such as OTT, IP Broadcast, Security and Virtualization all done via live workshops from some of the best in the industry presenting.
The second way we are showcasing “Live” is by collaborating with our CiscoTV colleagues, Cisco’s in house broadcast production group. Together we will fully produce the entire show, Live, and in IP. The technology foundation for this live production is our Cisco IP Fabric for Media solution integrated with our partner, EVS, and their newly launched broadcast controller named BCIP. Collaborating with CiscoTV is a great example of working in this holy-grail environment and putting our own innovation and partnerships on full display.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwmyF6DhRc
This innovation leverages the best in class technology from both companies: our Cisco IP Fabric for Media solution including DCNM (Data Center Network Manager) integrated via a set of open API’s into the BCIP platform to provide a turnkey workflow delivered by EVS. The technology and services provided by EVS for CiscoTV producing Cisco Live are those same technology & services that you would see in any Live event whether that be at a stadium, broadcast studio or newsroom. This type of Live event is indeed the “home turf” of our partners at EVS who have built a 25 year-old company focused on Live Production and making it their sweet spot with tools like Slow Motion Instant Replay, IP Based Switchers, other production related solutions including its newest BCIP and why having them partner with CiscoTV was a natural fit!
We are thrilled to work with innovative colleagues like CiscoTV and tremendous partners such as EVS to rock the holy grail of Live production at Cisco Live 2017!
Las Vegas is one of the world’s most unusual cities, not only for its unique mix of businesses, visitors and communities, but also for its visionary leadership. Las Vegas is avidly adopting smart technologies that its mayor and her technical advisors are confident will boost the city’s reputation for going big to a whole new level. It is also another exceptional proving ground for Cisco and its newly updated Smart+Connected Digital Platform to demonstrate the power of data when harnessed and shared.
“Las Vegas is becoming known for its efforts to provide safe, reliable and efficient civic technology. We plan to deploy solutions that will enhance mobility, reduce congestion, improve resident safety, reduce our carbon footprint and stimulate economic growth and diversity. It only makes sense for Las Vegas to emerge as a Smart City and we are excited to join forces with Cisco to make this happen,” said Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman.
Cisco is already seeing great success with the Smart+Connected Digital Platform, now operating in communities across the globe since we officially announced the platform back in November of 2016, with many more poised to follow suit soon. So, we’re delighted not only to have a presence here in Las Vegas at Cisco Live US, where we’re now announcing the update to the platform, but also to reinforce our strong relationship with and support for the City of Las Vegas as it takes its next steps forward in becoming a smart city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0ry02Toiag
That journey involves implementing new technologies and processes that will drive efficiencies, improve safety, and create richer citizen experiences—starting with the network of the future coupled with the platform approach. A new Cisco research report estimates the value at stake for cities, such as new opportunities and cost savings, at approximately $2.3 trillion globally by 2024. And, we feel strongly that the Smart+Connected Digital Platform will help to move cities in the right direction to realizing that value—particularly in view of the new additions that this important update includes.
The Smart+Connected Digital Platform will, of course, continue to provide a powerful way to aggregate and organize data—coming from city infrastructure sensors, mobile devices, cameras and other data sources—in a consistent format. And it will still make it easy for both agency- and public-facing applications to tap into that data, in a compliant and secure fashion, to give cities an edge in making better, more informed decisions in real-time. But now, with the new release, comes a variety of platform enhancements and new capabilities, including:
Pre-packaged solution bundles that combine secure Cisco networking technologies and services with expert third-party products and services, including on-going managed service offerings
Easier configuration and operation with pre-packaged, commercial off-the-shelf platform options and expanded sharing capabilities
End-to-end embedded data and device security
Enhanced dashboard capabilities complete with video
Automated updates to city-business-process policy changes and flexible reporting
Option to integrate Cisco Spark for immediate response and collabortation city stakeholders for issue mitigation
A self-service device and application integration feature for vendors to ease entry into the partner ecosystem
Improvements to existing solutions for transit (buses and fleets), parking, traffic, lighting, and crowd management, environment and added support for additional use cases including safety and security and waste management
“These changes will go far in strengthening our entire solution portfolio, expanding our ecosystem, improving our time to market and facilitating adoption of this powerful data management framework,” adds Bryan Tantzen, senior director of the Industries Product Group & Manufacturing Business Unit at Cisco. “For instance, the platform now includes Cisco Spark, so a flagging system device or condition can actually trigger Spark to pop up a virtual meeting room and invite the key stakeholders into the space to immediately collaborate on addressing the issue at hand. This should be a real game changer in the way city operations are managed.”
Not all cities are alike, as we know. So, the new enhancements and capabilities not only help to build a better experience to drive results, but also simplify the process and provide more options for meeting a city’s specific needs. In fact, we’ve just established a new initiative with one of our valued distribution partners, Tech Data. We will be working together to simplify and tailor the options for how the Smart+Connected Digital Platform can be deployed by the channel for the growing list of communities, like Las Vegas, are ready to move forward on their digital transformation journey.
Every smart city begins with its network. Cisco Smart+Connected Communities solutions work from the network infrastructure up, giving our customers three decades of rock-solid networking expertise and a decade of focused research with city leaders worldwide.
If you’ll be at Cisco Live this week in Las Vegas, stop by the IoT and Industry District in the World of Solutions and experience the power of the Smart+Connected Digital Platform for yourself, or sign up for our breakout session, featuring Michael Sherwood, the CIO for the City of Las Vegas. We also invite you to follow us @CiscoGovt for all our #CLUS and #DigitalPlatform coverage.
Last week we announced a major evolution to the Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA). It introduces a new era of networking, that brings intent-based management solutions and services to businesses. It protects networks like never before, makes them more flexible and responsive, and turns network traffic data into actionable business insights. It’s the biggest upgrade to networking we’ve ever shipped.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the drivers for this new era of networking. The proliferation of hundreds of millions – soon to be billions – of connected devices demands a network that can manage this scale, and adapt to the changing environment. The growth in IoT is, in turn, driven by business opportunities, as the data generated by these connected devices can be applied to measurable business results.
Our goal is to streamline the path from connecting things to deriving business value for our customers. This requires the automated management of millions or billions of devices, and unlocking data at a scale that’s never been achieved before.
Today we made two big announcements to deliver on this goal.
First, we launched Cisco Jasper Control Center 7.0, the biggest update of the world’s largest IoT connectivity management platform. With Control Center 7.0 we’ve introduced an unmatched approach to IoT solutions. We’re giving customers, and our service provider partners, the flexibility to implement the IoT capabilities and services that are right for them, and the ability to scale their IoT businesses.
We also introduced Cisco Kinetic, our IoT operations platform, which streamlines the capability of companies bringing their IoT initiatives to market. Developed with three key areas of focus – Connection Management, Fog Computing, and Data Delivery – Cisco Kinetic will help enterprises accelerate the path from proof of concept to implementation, and give our partners a powerful foundation on which to build additional services.
We’re bringing these critical pieces together to power IoT success via the new network, and we’re doing it alongside industry-leading strategic partners. And we will continue to partner in the IoT ecosystem to deliver a full stack of IoT solutions to our customers.
Cisco is making the network of the future available to you, today. We’re giving you the power to leverage your networks, your connected devices, and the explosion of valuable data produced by those devices, to drive your business forward.
Note: This blog post discusses active research by Talos into a new threat. This information should be considered preliminary and will be updated as research continues. For the most current info, please read our full blog on TalosIntelligence.com.
Since the SamSam attacks that targeted US healthcare entities in March 2016, Talos has been concerned about the proliferation of malware via unpatched network vulnerabilities. In May 2017, WannaCry ransomware took advantage of a vulnerability in SMBv1 and spread like wildfire across the Internet.
Today a new malware variant has surfaced that is distinct enough from Petya that people have referred to it by various names such as Petrwrap and GoldenEye. Talos is identifying this new malware variant as Nyetya. The sample leverages EternalBlue, EternalRomance, WMI, and PsExec for lateral movement inside an affected network. This behavior is detailed later in the blog under “Malware Functionality”. Unlike WannaCry, Nyetya does not appear to contain an external scanning component.
Intuition. It is one of the key traits that makes us human. What if we could make the network intuitive in translating intent into network configuration? Could a network learn to defend itself against malware and threats?
In a digital world, enterprises networks are under the onslaught of a myriad of different forces. On one hand, there is the explosion of devices getting on the network. This brings with it connectivity challenges and security challenges. On the other hand, transformations of computing and storage are starting to gain maturity and organizations are now looking to replicate these virtualization benefits at the level of the network. These new digital requirements need a fundamentally different approach.
Enter SD-Access.
While software-defined networking (SDN) concepts provided a starting point to begin solving some of these problems it clearly was not enough. SD-Access is a new capability that combines the power of policy-based networking, an intelligent network fabric and automation to make intent-based networking a reality today. SD-Access makes the network look like a “single” large virtual switch to the users and devices connecting to it. Establishing a layer of virtualization for the end user and the network node is becoming increasingly necessary to manage the growth of people and devices getting on to the network. Virtualization allows for agility and flexibility in ways that hitherto have been unavailable.
To delve deeper, SD-Access enables security and segmentation within the network. SD-Access makes it intuitive to segment your network based on user and device identity using simple and automated workflows. It has never been easier to build virtual networks of IOT devices, guest devices and user devices within a single converged infrastructure. SD-Access combines wired and wireless networks within the intelligent network fabric and makes it easy to seamlessly roam anywhere in the network providing uninterrupted mobility services to the end-user. Finally, SD-Access enables IT teams to now offer customized services to different lines of business.
What makes me proudest in regards to SD-Access is how we tackled the networking industry’s big, tough, “unsolvable” problem. We began this journey over two years ago and had the best minds in the industry work to fundamentally transform networking. Our engineers worked closely with a select set of customers to validate our hypothesis and use cases in a co-development model and used their critical inputs to refine our solutions. We conducted extensive user-testing and validation of our workflow to ensure that we could capture intent from very different user-personas and make this solution as simple and elegant as possible. Keeping up with growth and mobility isn’t just about making things faster, sometimes it’s about building in near-infinite flexibility that allows for expansion, new uses and newer innovations for years to come.
Get the Podcast
In addition to an eight-foot-tall stuffed bear, this campground themed area within World of Solutions is stuffed with companies that work with our collaboration products. A quick list of who is there to share: 2Ring America, Akkadian Labs, Altocloud, Approved Contact, Arcana Networks, Bucher + Suter, CallPlease, IntelePeer, Jive Communications, Kore.ai, Kurmi, Local Measure, NVT Phybridge, Pegasystems, PromptWorks, QWASI, Synergy SKY, Telstra, Upstream Works, Vyopta, WWT
To delve deeper, SD-Access enables security and segmentation within the network. SD-Access makes it intuitive to segment your network based on user and device identity using simple and automated workflows. It has never been easier to build virtual networks of IOT devices, guest devices and user devices within a single converged infrastructure. SD-Access combines wired and wireless networks within the intelligent network fabric and makes it easy to seamlessly roam anywhere in the network providing uninterrupted mobility services to the end-user. Finally, SD-Access enables IT teams to now offer customized services to different lines of business.