Nuclear security is a high priority international threat today. The Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) 2014 took place in The Hague, the Netherlands, following the summits in Washington D.C (2010) and Seoul (2012).

Network Requirements:

An event of this magnitude required nothing but the best network solution. The venue had existing small networks across 5 buildings and 4 tents. They decided to disable the existing networks and setup a comprehensive Cisco network solution exclusively for this event. The major requirements were: Read More »

Tags: midmarket, network management, NSS, security, unified access, VLAN, wi-fi, wifi, wireless

Every day our world becomes increasingly connected. And as the Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to develop, service providers who provide us with video, voice, and data services are faced with managing explosive growth of demand on their network, including the number of applications and platforms needed to improve the way we live, learn, work and play.

All of this makes networks more complex and expensive to manage.  At the same time, increased competition is driving service providers to introduce new services more rapidly. While Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and network programmability both help improve scale and functionality of networks for service providers, they do not solve the bottleneck caused by operational complexity.

That is why today, I am pleased to announce our intent to acquire Tail-f Systems, a leading provider of multi-vendor network orchestration solutions for traditional and virtual networks. Tail-f will help achieve our goal of aiding customers in their quest to simplify and automate network management, enabling service innovation and deployment acceleration. The acquisition of Tail-f accelerates Cisco’s cloud virtualization strategy of delivering software that increases value to our customers’ applications and services, while supporting Cisco’s long-standing commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments.

Tail-f’s innovative and talented team is also the thought leader around the development and implementation of the NETCONF protocol and YANG data modeling language, which is the leading industry approach to simplifying and automating networks. Tail-f also has an amazing team of talented engineers. Tail-f’s talent and technology, when added to our existing offerings, will enhance how Cisco addresses network orchestration and will help simplify and automate how physical and virtual networks are both provisioned and managed.

We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to continue driving leadership in cloud virtualization and orchestration with the addition of Tail-f. Stay tuned for more details in the weeks and months to come.  And welcome Tail-f!

Tags: acquisition, Hilton Romanski, M&A, network management, NFV, orchestration, Service Orchestration

Time is money. And the more time it takes to deploy and provision devices on your network, the more costly it is for your organization.

On August 21, join our experts for a deep-dive exploration of Cisco Prime Infrastructure, a critical part of the Cisco Unified Access solution, and learn how Cisco Prime Infrastructure can speed the deployment and configuration of your unified access environment. Cisco Prime Infrastructure reduces errors and difficult-to-diagnose configuration issues, through a logical, simple-to-use workflow.

During this detailed session, you’ll hear and see a live demo, and learn how Cisco is reinventing the way that network devices are deployed.

As part of the Cisco Unified Access solution, Cisco Prime Infrastructure delivers a single management point of view. It offers comprehensive lifecycle management of wired and wireless access, campus and branch networks, complete visibility into end-user connectivity, and application performance assurance. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, deployment, network, network management, pi, Prime Infrastructure, unified access, wi-fi, wired, wireless

Having completed all of the previous strategy elements, you are ready to deploy.  Is that all there is to it? Not quite.  In this post, I’ll highlight strategies you can use for a smooth post-deployment.

Change Management

In one of my past experiences, deployment of our branch routers went off without a hitch and we patted ourselves on the back and went home.  In the morning, operations noted a reload on two of the routers we had upgraded the night before.  It appeared that one of the defects we evaluated had not discovered “all” of the traffic that could force the reload. So what was the impact of all this? As part of our change management strategy, we were certain to ensure that we could back out on our changes.  Additionally, we set the device to load the old software and configuration if the device reloaded.  This resulted in less than a minute outage for those devices that did reload and the design allowed for seamless failover between the two switches.  Failure to do so would have resulted in the router continuously reloading as these packets were encountered -, which would unlikely be noticed. It is important to note that there was no impact on the production network or business services. Read More »

Tags: network management, network optimization, strategies

Much has been made of the emergence of Software Defined Networking and the programmable network.  At its core, SDN involves opening up network interfaces in order to make the network programmable and allow for the development of applications.  While some of those applications interact directly with the data plane, determining how individual packets are treated, many applications actually involve what can fundamentally be described as management functionality – automation of workflows, reaction to events, closing of control loops.   A popular example concerns orchestration, in which resources are allocated and state modified so that collectively a service is provided – in many ways resembling a reincarnation of service provisioning in a new context and under a new name.

Of course, management applications and management interfaces have been around for a long time, so what is really new and different this time?  Is SDN simply an exciting new label for a tired old concept? Does SDN obviate the need for traditional management? At the core of these questions are the concepts of programmability and manageability.  Read More »

Tags: applications, Intelligent Network, Manageability, network management, programmability, SDN, software defined networking