The service provider environment is going through unprecedented change, requiring service providers to respond quickly to new market trends in order to stay competitive, monetize new services and drive optimization while continuing to deliver “carrier class” services ubiquitously.

Additionally, the increased emphasis on cloud computing is placing new demands on the network. For cloud services to be seamless, the underlying network must be intelligent, carrier-class and virtualized.

But as the saying goes, with change comes opportunity, and for partners the evolving service provider market opportunity is huge. Just how big are we talking? Take a look at the figures below.

Source: Infonetics Research

These numbers only address the pure technology opportunities; the Internet of Everything (IoE) is the other key ingredient to this story, an opportunity estimated at $19 trillion. Today, 70 percent of people and 99 percent of things are not connected. As new industries emerge around IoE, the solutions that will be introduced will need service providers to provide the connectivity and often times the value-added services. Read More »

Tags: asr 9000, carrier class, Cisco, cloud, CRS internet of things, epn, esp, InterCloud, IoT, iot specializations, IP NGN, mobility, NCS 2000, NFV, partner, routing, SDN, Service Provider, small cell, SP, sp specializations, SP WiFi, specializations

Network customers have always bought networks for one and only one reason: to run their applications over them.  Yet for most of that time, those networks have been largely oblivious to the composition of the network traffic they carried.  Traditional network tools could tell you whether your network was having a lot of errors, or whether a given link or interface was congested, but they couldn’t tell you what was congesting your network, beyond the limited granularity of a few well-known ports.  Finding out that you’ve got a lot of HTTP or HTTPS is not very helpful in finding out whether you’re swamped by personal traffic that needs to be controlled, or by legitimate business traffic that requires an increase in effective bandwidth.

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Tags: bandwidth, Cisco Application Experience, InfoVista, IWAN, managed services, network, routing, vodafone, Vodafone Application Visibility and Control, WAN

As the U.S. approaches the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, there are likely more than a few IT folks who are saying thanks for the ISR 4000 Series, and the challenges it has addressed. Over the past year, we’ve had over 1,000 customers deploy the ISR 4000 Series, and the industry has repeatedly validated the positive impact of the platform on the IT and networking community:

• “Best of Networking” Award, Best of Interop in Las Vegas (April 2014)
• “Best of Networking” Award, Best of Interop in Tokyo (June 2014)
• And most recently: “Networking Product of the Year” Award, Tech World (November 2014)

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Tags: Integrated Services Routers, interop, ISR 4000, router, routing, Tech World, zeus kerravala

Data traffic has grown dramatically in the recent years, leading to increased deployment of network service appliances and servers in enterprise, data center, and cloud environments. To address the corresponding business needs, network switch and router architecture has evolved to support multi-terabit capacity. However, service appliance and server capacity remained limited to a few gigabits, far below switch capacity.

ITD (Intelligent Traffic Director) is a hardware based multi-Tbps Layer 4 load-balancing, traffic steering and clustering solution on Nexus 7xxx series of switches. It supports IP-stickiness, resiliency, NAT (EFT), VIP, health monitoring, sophisticated failure handling policies, N+M redundancy, IPv4, IPv6, VRF, weighted load-balancing, bi-directional flow-coherency, and IPSLA probes including DNS. There is no service module or external appliance needed. ITD provides order of magnitude CAPEX and OPEX savings for the customers. ITD is available on Nexus 7000/7700 series in NX-OS 6.2(8) or later. It is available for demo on Nexus 5k/6k. ITD is much superior than legacy solutions like PBR, WCCP, ECMP, port-channel, layer-4 load-balancer appliances.

Example use-cases: Read More »

Tags: ACE, application performance, cache engines, cisco appnav, Cisco Data Center, cisco firewall, Cisco vWAAS, Citrix NetScaler, clustering, ECMP, ITD, load bala, load balancer, routing, Scalability, vPC

Imagine that you see a Tweet today inviting you to apply for a part-time networking job, something you can do in addition to your normal job. You appear to be qualified for the job, and the work looks interesting as well. However, it requires enough of your time so that you would have to set aside your current professional development plans, including study for that next Cisco certification. The job lasts one year.

Would you take the job, setting aside your certification plans for a year? How much money would you need to make in that job before it would entice you to abandon your learning and certification plans for a year?

This post works through a couple of ideas (like the above) about how to quantify the value of a certification. Many people expect that more skills and certifications will give them more Read More »

Tags: #ciscochampion, CCIE, CCNA, CCNP, Cisco Certifications, cisco champion, routing, switching