This week Cisco announced an entirely new approach to delivering rich services to the Enterprise branch office with the introduction of the ISR 4000 Series. For those folks paying attention over the last year this really was no shock. In fact the ISR 4451 announced at Cisco Live 2013 is the first member of this new series teasing the concepts and technologies represented today in an entire portfolio of platforms.

The ISR 4000 Series consists of 5 platforms that spread the architecture and technology introduced with the 4451 across a portfolio designed to meet the needs of most branch offices. With performance-on-demand, these 5 platforms hit 10 different performance levels, from 50Mbps to 2Gbps with services, giving IT departments the capability to pay for only the capacity they need with the option to increase performance with a simple license. The multi-core control/data/services plane CPUs with included virtualization through Service Containers, server replacement capabilities with the UCS E-Series and flat performance-curve with services are truly revolutionary in the industry, so how did we get here? Read More »

Tags: 2500 Series, 2600 Series, Cisco ISR 4451-x, CLI, Gas, interop, IOS, ISR, ISR G2, ISR4k, onePK, router, Service Coontainers, services, snmp

How many times have we done something for others? Something for people we don’t even know. We all love doing things either for ourselves, family or friends but participating in a cause, which is entirely for people who do not currently enjoy the beautiful morning walks, running or playing is another dimension and fills us with energy.

Would you like to participate in such a cause?  It is happening simultaneously worldwide where everyone is running for those who can’t!

The Wings for Life World Run is an entirely new type of event never before seen nor undertaken in either running or any other sporting field. Why? Because it is a truly global adventure, encompassing up to 35 locations, in which everyone runs at the very same time all over the world! Read More »

Tags: healthcare, ISR, ISR G2, MDES, Spinal Cord Injury, Tiani Spirit, UCS, UCS-E Series, Wings for Life, World Run

You want to do what?

Enterprise networks are special.  They require bomb-proof design, micro-second convergence and service-level agreements so good that the WAN will only be down for half a second every year scheduled six weeks ahead of time for midnight over a holiday weekend.  That’s what we’re taught from the time we’re young Network Engineers sitting on our parents’ knees.  An Enterprise network is something special they taught us.  We should never consider running our mission-critical traffic over the dirty, unreliable Internet!  Such talk would be blasphemy akin to looking for a date at a funeral.  It might work for some, but our network is special and must be treated that way.

So what is all of this talk then, coming from Cisco no less, of using Internet links to run an Enterprise-class network?  Cisco recently introduced the Intelligent WAN (IWAN) solution that promotes exactly this sort of “illicit” behavior.  So what’s changed?

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Tags: AX, internet as wan, ISR, ISR G2, IWAN, routers, transport independence

Needle and thread. Fire and wood.  Peanut butter and jelly.  Just a few things that are essential together so that you can sew, keep warm and well, is just yummy.  So what happens when the data center-class server blade for the branch meets applications?  That’s the topic discussed in the 2^nd episode of the Inside the Branch: UCS E-series episodes.

Last week was the series premier of our 5 part series on UCSE.  Hugo and Jay discussed the basics of the product and some key facts we should know.  In this episode, Hugo met with Vidya, our guru in charge of Cisco applications for UCSE.

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Tags: Cisco, enterprise networks, insidebranch, ISR, ISR G2, UCS, UCS-E Series, UCSE

Recently, I was chatting with Hugo Vliegen, Director of Technical marketing, Enterprise Networks, and he was telling me all of the questions he had been getting from customers about the Cisco UCS E-Series.  Questions such as:

• What’s this rumor I’ve heard that Cisco has a server that sits on a branch router?
• You’re telling me the UCS E-Series is enterprise-class? What does that even mean?
• What’s new on the Cisco ISR series?

So I suggested we do an interview series with Hugo – something short and fun where he could get the Cisco experts on the record and help our customers learn a little more about the UCS E-Series. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, insidebranch, ISR, ISR G2, routers, UCS, UCS-E Series