Welcome to the Lippis Report

The Interop expo and conference used to be an industry event where you got an industry snapshot and projected major trends for the year to come. But the organizers diluted the event by adding the software2008 and CSI SX security conferences; plus they offered conferences within a conference such as their CIO Boot Camp, Energy Camp, the Unconference, et al while piling on IT topics for the main Interop conference. In all there were over 250 conference sessions on nearly every IT topic one could image or create spread out over five days. The exhibition floor attendance was about the same as last year +/- 10% at approx 20,000 attendees. With so much noise and very little signal at Interop, you had to ask what was the value of attending? For me it’s the one-on-one meetings. This is what I walked away with from Interop.

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By Extreme Networks

Extreme Networks® products have the features it takes to protect an enterprise network from the inside-out. This paper discusses the advanced security features that Extreme Networks builds into its switches and routers. Extreme Networks offers a rich portfolio of network infrastructure and security devices, ranging from 1U appliances to gigantic enterprise switches. Extreme Networks products provide connectivity, and protect converged networks from security threats using network access control, network segmentation and threat mitigation.

Adena Health System uses Cisco switching, security, and wireless to deliver a rich suite of state-of-the-art clinical applications that bring vital information to the bedside, improve quality of care, and support advanced video and telemedicine services.

Imagine you are the chief information officer (CIO) of a major regional hospital in your first week on the job. You have barely finished unpacking your office when all of a sudden, the entire network goes down. All applications — health information systems, e-mail, clinical applications — are offline. And the chief hospital executives who hired you are standing in your office asking what you plan to do about it. The scenario is every CIO’s worst nightmare, but it was all too real for Marcus Bost, CIO of Adena Health System.

By Avaya

How do I keep my branches operating at peak efficiency while simultaneously ensuring that they are providing premium services and a branded customer experience? Avaya has worked with leading financial institutions around the world who have addressed this challenge by focusing on three major business imperatives:

• Redefining the role of the branch for revenue generation.
• Improving employee productivity throughout the distributed branch environment for maximized operational efficiency.
• Delivering a personalized customer experience for competitive differentiation.

This paper explores the role of Intelligent Communications as an enabler in helping banks and their branches achieve revenue growth, operational optimization and a differentiated customer experience.

Many IT leaders have build private application delivery networks while outsourcing content delivery network needs to improve the performance of video, music downloads, and rich media. These two separate networks are now converging into one physical but logically separate networks with unique attributes for the traffic, which flows through them. Two experts in the field from Internap; Phil Kaplan Chief Strategy Officer and Tim Sullivan Chief Technology Officer join me to discuss how these two network clouds are beginning to drift together and what this will mean to IT operations and business. Internap’s approach to service delivery is software based and relies upon backbone router vendors such as Foundry Network’s NetIron XMR and its ServerIron to deliver the services it offers. If you have built an application delivery network and outsource content delivery to a service provider then you need to listen to this podcast.

IP video is being massively consumed in the consumer and corporate markets. In 2007 IP video exceeded the total sum of 2000 internet traffic which was nearly 25 Petabytes/month while IDC estimates that corporate video traffic will more then double in the next two years with greater then half of all corporations currently using some form of IP video. IP video is either deployed from the bottom up or top down. Click-to-conference plus enterprise based Web 2.0 social networking and collaboration initiatives are deployed from the bottom up while video surveillance, digital signage, TelePresence, and one-to-many for training and executive-to-employee briefings broadcast are top down. In short, business and IT leaders will not have total control over IP video deployments and are advised to prepare your networks for IP video. Kumar Srikantan Senior Director of Cisco’s Campus Switching Systems Technology Group joins me to discuss best practices to guide IT leaders to prepare their networks in support of IP video services. If your corporation is using IP video, then you need to listen to this podcast.

IP video is usually discussed in the context of wide area communications or providing videoconferencing between distant sites. But IP video is being massively consumed within office buildings and campuses. The bulk of IP video traffic is generated from video on demand and videoconferencing applications. IP video is a set of applications that are being layered on top of today’s converged voice and data IP networks creating what we call “converged networking 2.0”. IP video streams made up of multicast, unicast, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many video flows are adding to an already large matrix of traffic patterns and logical networks, with unique requirements and attributes, which propagate throughout a converged network. Converged networking 2.0 supports this new set of applications, creating a single IP network which supports voice, data and video.

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By Blair Pleasant UCStrategies

Unified Communications (UC) technologies such as conferencing and collaboration have been providing significant benefits including enhanced productivity to large enterprises for several years, but the mid-market – those companies with between 100 and 1000 employees – are just now embracing these technologies for competitive advantage. The mid-market faces unique challenges that unified communications and related technologies can help address. New products and services are being introduced, aimed at the mid-market, to help this segment realize the benefits of improved communications. Mid-market companies focused on improving worker productivity and business results can implement conferencing and collaboration technologies to help workers better communicate with customers, partners, and co-workers. These conferencing and collaboration technologies and tools are helping mid-market companies solve their business problems while making their business processes more efficient and effective.

By Cisco Systems

Cisco realized five years ago that the network edge was changing. The existing network-processor design would not be sufficient to meet the needs of exploding video traffic growth and emerging collaborative applications, nor meet the need for borderless networking where any service could be offered securely anywhere in the network. General-purpose processors enabled flexible network services and rapid feature development but lacked traffic prioritization mechanisms and suffered from slow forwarding performance. Over the last few years, faster network-processor technology became a mainstream technology that is more than doubling annually. Even in the past few years however, many of the multi-core network processors available offered high throughputs but limited service flexibility with fixed feature pipeline processing and inflexible classification and packet-processing programming languages. The Cisco QuantumFlow Processor takes network-processor technology to the next level by moving away from other rigid forms of processing technology to one of true massively parallel and flexible flow processing for classification, services integration, and traffic management.

By Cisco Systems

Environmental responsibility has become an important topic of discussion in the last few years—not only in the general public, but in businesses as well. Many major corporations have begun to institute green policies that guide the manner in which they manage their operations. As companies work toward minimizing their effect on the environment, they must examine several areas:

Business operations, especially as related to the effect of space, power, and cooling on energy consumption;

Supplemental benefits of carbon reduction such as reduced numbers of employees commuting and traveling;

Equipment longevity to forestall e-waste and management policies for the responsible retirement of obsolete equipment;

Selection of suppliers and vendors that operate their businesses in an ecologically conscientious fashion.

The innovative, new Cisco® ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router can be an important component in helping you achieve your overall environmental objectives. By consolidating the capabilities of multiple single-function devices and allowing you to instantly turn on new services, the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router provides an energy-efficient and long-lasting deployment alternative. This approach offers you direct benefits, such as reduced rack space, power, and cooling requirements. In addition, it facilitates many secondary benefits, including the ability to reduce employee travel and training costs.

With every IT paradigm transition comes not only increased bandwidth requirements, but an increased reliance on network services such as security, remote VPN access, QoS, and application classification to support a wide variety of corporate applications. Also new WAN services such as Metro Ethernet and 3G wireless are redefining WAN design. Between these demanding new applications and WAN options, lies the aggregation router, which has been primarily a narrowband device connecting sites via Frame Relay and MPLS, and thus has presented a bottleneck to new real-time collaboration technologies. This is all about to change, because a new era of WAN design has emerged. New router platforms are rare as their life-cycle is usually greater then a decade. So when one is announced it’s the beginning of a long industry cycle and when it’s Cisco who’s making the announcement you know that it’s an industry-changing event. Cisco has announced its Aggregation Services Router, or ASR, 1000 Series, which is focused on the high-end enterprise WAN and service provider edges. The ASR value proposition is rooted in a reduction of appliance hardware, lower WAN cost through aggregation and lower operational spend thanks to management break-throughs. Marie Hattar, Senior Director of Network Systems and Security solutions marketing at Cisco Systems is my guest as we dive into the ASR and new WAN design options it enables. To get the cost out and performance into your WAN, listen to this podcast.

The Kent School District is the fourth largest school in the state of Washington comprised of four high schools, six middle schools, 28 elementary schools and two academies with nearly 27,000 students and 3200 employees. Kent’s IT staff were challenged to support a doubling of networked computers, new IT service requirements including virtualized desktops, smart boards, video surveillance and unified communications all while keeping their operational budget constant. Kent under went a district-wide network refresh, where the IT team sought to replace the current edge network that included products from ProCurve Networking by HP and 3Com for Cisco. I talk with Thuan Nguyen, Director of IT at Kent School District about his options, decisions and results. It’s a fascinating case of what can be done in IT today.

By Cisco Systems

Integrated communications systems are inherently more secure than traditional stand-alone phone and messaging systems. In today´s global economy, traditional time and geographical boundaries are vanishing. Many businesses have adopted a 24-hours-a-day approach to serving customers, who may be located anywhere in the world, in any time zone. For businesses, government agencies, and academic organizations to thrive in this dynamic market, personnel must remain accessible to colleagues and customers worldwide. Employees who, like the customers they serve, are geographically distributed and mobile require the capability to securely obtain information from wherever they are to help their organizations compete successfully.

Research reveals a significant negative business effect when workgroups experience delays in reaching primary decision makers. Delays are exacerbated when organizations run multiple, stand-alone systems that do not provide employees with an integrated and secure way to conduct and manage their many forms of communication.

The edge or access of a network connects all end-points into an enterprise network infrastructure. The network edge is made up of wiring closet switches, which are usually fixed Ethernet switching devices. The market for wiring closet switches is evolving.

In the previous decade IT organizations had traditionally pursued an edge network that utilized shared hubs and switches to provide connectivity to end-points. The primary buying criteria was price per port with low price being paramount. These switching devices possessed few network services such as layer 2 forwarding, Virtual Local Area Networking (VLAN), Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and a configuration tool as their primary network management capabilities. In short the old network access model provided best effort connectivity services with little to no operational control.

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