Cloud

3 min read

Are we treating Cloud just like another Data Center? Yesterday at Google Next, Urs Hölzle quoted a great stat by RightScale – users waste 45% of cloud resources that they buy. While this number is not too far from what typically happens in traditional data centers, which operate at 20-30% of capacity on average, cloud promises a pay-per-use model. You provision and pay for only what you utilize. This promise leaves the user with the impression that they will effectively achieve 100% value—reducing costs significantly compared to an inefficient data center. And while Google’s new committed pricing model tries to lessen the impact, it does not address the root cause of the problem.

3 min read

Berlin. Europe’s Europe. Where someone thought of doing this so you can smile when paying to park your car: Where this was also happening the week before the last: In other words, the first Cisco Live for 2017 (and unsurprisingly the subject of this post). But before I get into the details of the event, […]

3 min read

It’s a complicated world out there, especially when it comes to cloud. Customers are trying to figure out the right cloud strategy, and it isn’t easy. The Amazon S3 outage is an example of just how complex the situation is. While that interruption only lasted four hours, the impacts were felt far and wide. So is public cloud still a viable option? Or course it is. Amazon Web Services published their post-mortem and the issue was human error and fully correctable. Despite this, there is no disputing the reliability of S3 which is on-par or even better than most enterprise storage options. It’s just that since AWS is so large and so pervasive, it makes the news when it fails and when that failure happens, we see multiple systems that all rely on S3 failing at once.

2 min read

Last week at Cisco live! 2017 EMEA in the historic city of Berlin, we shared the early availability of Contiv 1.0 with almost 14,000 customers and partners. Today, we are excited to share the milestone with our broader community. Additionally, I am thrilled to report that Docker has certified<> Contiv as the very first certified container networking product, and it is now available in the Docker Store. Docker Certification Program recognizes products that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Integration and testing by Docker to certify Contiv is yet another data-point to our customers about its production readiness which enables them to adopt containers with confidence and low risk.

3 min read

Have you ever wondered why some organizations are more successful in delivering services and applications with serious resource constraints to its every increasing distributed workforce? Chances are the IT teams are using some variation of cloud computing to solve these and other modern day IT challenges. Private cloud serves as an enabler for organizations to deliver IT as a service (ITaaS). This makes organizations more agile and efficient through reduction of cost, economies of scale and increased efficiency. Cisco uses its innovative cloud platform to facilitate automation, virtualization and simplification to increase business value whilst reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). Cisco cloud services can be delivered using three methods: first, there is the Cisco private cloud (through internally hosted or owned infrastructure), second, through public cloud (cloud provider delivers services) and finally, a hybrid model (a mix of the previous two).

5 min read

Millennials are often judged as being ‘lazy, impatient and self-entitled.’ We want it all and we want it now (myself included!) But is that really a bad thing? Look at all the innovations that our impatience and need for convenience has sparked. The moment we wake up, we check our mails, read the day’s news and pay our bills all from the convenience of our smart phones. We ask Alexa to book us an Uber, grab our morning cuppa on the way to work, and pay for it all with our phone or even our watch. If there ever was a time when impatience was rewarded, it is now!

3 min read

We launched Secure Agile Exchange (SAE) last week in Berlin, Germany, as part of Cisco Live Europe. It was part of our DNA Virtualization announcement – it was so subtle you might have even missed it:-) We’ve been working on Secure Agile Exchange (SAE) for the last 3 years. We have a few customers going into production now with at least another 2 dozen in the pipeline. It is not a single product or SKU, but a comprehensive solution. What’s unique about SAE is that it was created and derived from the “front-line” versus the “corner office”. Consequently, the solution was born out of real world challenges and problems we hear about from our customers. Economists often say that innovation comes from small firms and most of the time they are right – not this time.

3 min read

On a recent trip to Silicon Valley, I stayed at a Marriott near the office. Although it was my first time at this particular hotel, I generally knew what to expect; comforts of the room, consistency of friendly staff, pervasive wireless internet access, and a simple bottle of water upon arrival, having stayed at other Marriott properties in the past. I count on this familiarity, this experience, to keep my work/life balance in check while I travel. Many well-traveled IT Pros can relate to this scenario as it plays out many times a day, across multiple industries all over the world.

3 min read

In 1984, after years of having separate thoughts on networking standards, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT) jointly published the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model, more commonly known as the OSI model. In the more than three decades that have passed since its inception, the OSI model has given millions of technologists a frame of reference to work from when discussing networking, which has worked out pretty well for Cisco.