Stephen Speirs

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Over the past few years, I've attended Gartner's Data Center Conference in London (see 2013, 2014, and 2015 !). As always, it was...

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Are you investing in new IT equipment – or for that matter, any IT services including SaaS/Cloud services?  If so, I wonder how much you have invested in your operations management...

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There are 2 questions I am asked from time to time: The first is related to my job – “OK I understand what's involved in product development, but why do ‘service...

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As we deliver more and more software projects in my part of Cisco Services, I have a keen interest in software development best practices.  And concerns on poor practices.  A...

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Last week, in Part 1, I blogged about the bizarre association of queues at my local ski centre and unreliable access to cloud payment services. Being located in an...

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Back in 2010, not long after I started blogging here on Cisco.com, I discussed some of the challenges customers were fearing regarding the feasibility of cloud adoption. In my market...

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I do enjoy the (sometimes irreverent!) perspectives of some articles on data center in the UK publication “The Register“, and the story of how a data center change went wrong made me laugh, cringe and cry at the same time – the change being when an electrician cut the wrong wire and brought down a […]

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A few years ago, I wrote a series of blogs on Cisco’s Domain Ten(SM)  framework.  Since then, we’ve used this simple yet powerful analysis tool to help guide many customers on data center and IT transformation projects.  I personally found it quite notable that leading market analyst firm IDC, recognizing Cisco as the worldwide leader […]

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Last week I attended the 2015 London Gartner Data Center conference. In my first blog (part 1) on this event,  I covered some of my main learnings and...

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This past week I attended the 2015 Gartner Data Center Conference in London.  This is always a great conference to learn from, although it always pays to look out...

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Two weeks ago, in my previous blog, I invited you to consider ways in which you could initiate a “Save to Invest” program for your data center. That is, how can you save money from your current data center spend, in order to re-invest it into currently un- or -under-funded areas of your data center. Thanks to […]

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 As a Scot, I have a natural predisposition – almost a gene – for money saving initiatives!  As I’ve been researching new initiatives in my work for Cisco Services over the past few months, I’ve become aware of – for the first time I am ashamed to say in some cases – some huge sinks […]

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Last week, here, I started my 2 part blog on some of the top SAN design and deployment challenges we see.  As I mentioned, I put this together...

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One of the aspects I really enjoy about my job is that I get to learn from some of the world’s top network and data center design engineers, and...

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Last week I introduced this topic, the pervasive problem of “comatose” servers in data centers, based upon an interesting recent eWeek article entitled “30 Percent of Servers Worldwide Sit Idle”, which in turn was based upon the research report by Stanford University in conjunction with the Anthesis Group.  In my blog, I described the costs […]

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In my role in Cisco Services, I’m more interested in the challenges of technology adoption and deployment than I am in speeds and feeds, statistics and technology fads. ...

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Cisco Live US 2015 is just around the corner, and will start in San Diego on June 7th, running through Thursday 11th June.  I’m surprised and honoured to...

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Earlier this month, I blogged about the challenges of Cloud Sprawl.  Let’s now turn to the challenges of “Application Sprawl”!If you are planning migration of applications inside or between data centers, or if you are planning a migration to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), the understanding of your applications and how they tie to the […]

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An interesting read for me one day last week was the Wall Street Journal reporting on the exploding yet ungoverned use of cloud services by employees in just...

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If you are involved in designing, supporting or managing a data center, you will undoubtedly rely on technical support services from one or more vendors.  Running your data center, there...

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My final observation from my days at the London Gartner Data Center Conference is related to SDN and ease of network management – or otherwise.  Hopefully this discussion will give...

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As I mentioned in yesterday's blog, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center Conference in London.   I came out of the conference with some questions...

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Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Data Center conference in London.   I attended 3 different sessions on SDN-related topics.  Here are some...

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OpenStack is gaining increasing industry attention and, while it can deliver huge...

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Last week I spent some time at the “Software Defined Networking 2014” conference in London.  It’s a relatively small conference I would say however given the growing interest in SDN and rapid progress of the technology it’s always good to hear alternative viewpoints and experiences.  And I certainly found the previous conference here in December […]

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It’s an exciting year for Scotland, with several very high profile events happening. On our doorstep in July is the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games – what we call “Glasgow 2014” – which, after the Olympics and World (soccer) Cup, is the third largest multi-nation sports event in the world.  (The Commonwealth Games is sporting celebration among the 53 member […]

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Working in the Data Center and Cloud Professional Services team in Cisco on cloud and software defined networking, I am sometimes asked "What do...