As I board the plane ready for the long flights to Barcelona, I’m excited and energised by the prospective of around 100 APAC customer meetings and Cisco technology demos. Hopefully when I get off the plane in the wee hours I’ll remain half as energised.

With all the discussions with Service Provider CxO teams on their expectations for the event, some common top of the mind issues or challenges for Cisco have emerged;

What are the Global trends in Traffic Demand?

Cisco VNI forecasts 10x Mobile Data traffic growth over the next 5-years, nothing new there, but Read More »

Tags: 5G, cisco VPCs, HetNet, mobile world congress, MVNO, MWC 2015, NFV, orchestration, ott, SDN, VoWifi

The increasing pace of business is creating high demand for IT efficiency and speed.

IT directly affects your ability to respond correctly and quickly to new opportunities.  Slow IT equates to slow business.

The latest release of Cisco UCS Director allows IT to automate the deployment of infrastructure delivering the speed and efficiency IT needs in order to support business demands.

Not familiar with Cisco UCS Director?  Briefly, this solution reduces data center complexity by replacing manual provisioning tasks with unified automated workflows that span compute, network, storage and virtualization.  But this solution doesn’t manage just Cisco products.  It unites Cisco UCS-based integrated infrastructures and third-party hardware solutions into a single management view to ensure maximum IT efficiency.  Heterogeneous management is just one of the features that makes Cisco UCS Director different.  You can learn more by going here. Read More »

Tags: cloud, FlexPod, infrastructure automation, nexus, orchestration, UCS, ucs director, Vblock, vcac, VMware, vspex

My last post reviewed some of the building blocks of SDN (Software Defined Networking) and positioned the protocols and APIs (Application Programming Interface) into categories so that the multitude of technologies associated with SDN can be positioned in a coherent framework. This month I’d like to start looking at some use cases where some of these things are used to deliver benefit in a service provider network.

I will review a consumer oriented offering and next month, one targeted at enterprise services.

As always, it is important to define the business outcome we are trying to affect when making a change to the network infrastructure. This case will consider an operator Read More »

Tags: BNG, CPE, deplpymetns, devices, entererpise services, epn, FMO, ipv4, IPv6, NFV, orchestration, PMO, SDN, Service Provider, virtual layer

The connections between your business success and data center efficiency have never been clearer or stronger. Delivering data center resources quickly to capitalize on new business opportunities or projects is a major factor for business success. The only way to expedite resource delivery is by replacing manual processes with repeatable, best-practice-based automated service consumption and delivery.

So what is getting in the way?

The first problem is inconsistent delivery of standardized infrastructure instances. Many solutions on the market today only manage virtual resources while others just support their proprietary hardware stack. Automation needs to be across all layers – and that includes networks. I believe the only way to achieve the speed and efficiency businesses desire is to manage your entire heterogeneous data center as a unified whole — holistically. Read More »

Tags: automation, FlexPod, infrastructure, nexus, orchestration, Prime Service Catalog, self-service delivery, UCS, ucs director, VACS, Vblock, vcac, vCloud Suite, VMware, vspex

Businesses move quickly until they have to cross rough roads paved with technical challenges. That’s because even though data centers are sophisticated, the components that support most businesses still include far too many 20^th century manual processes, silo based resources and administrators pressured to keep up.

Although automation can speed up IT, and your business,  many companies are wrestling with it. Please watch this video from Cisco and Forrester to understand why organizations are struggling with automation – see if it sounds familiar (I bet it will).

After you watch it, if you want send me a brief email about your experience with these issues. Read More »

Tags: automation, Cisco, cloud, IAC, orchestration, ucs director, vcac, vCloud Suite, VMware