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With CAPEX accounting for only 20% of the cost of a network, it is important to look beyond initial expenditures and consider TCO and the business value a network can provide. A third-party TCO comparison of a Cisco network versus other vendors illustrates that Cisco can deliver a 13% better TCO even before business benefits, such as network uptime and employee productivity are considered. Further, the Cisco Borderless Network Architecture acts as a platform for service delivery, allowing your IT organization to say “yes” to business and revenue-enhancing opportunities.
Modern corporate networks are under increasing pressure to support a wider variety of applications thanks to mobile and cloud computing, desktop virtualization plus video traffic having skyrocketed. Not only are bandwidth rates increasing from 1 to 10 to 40 GbE, but most importantly network services are needed to manage and support a different application portfolio mix and network access methods. Network services such as firewalls, WLANs, network diagnostics and monitoring plus application performance acceleration are needed to deliver a consistently excellent user experience. Cisco recently announced an upgrade to its popular Catalyst 6k with the availability of the Supervisor 2T that included re-vamped high performance service modules to deliver these network services. Goyal, product line manager at Cisco Systems joins me to discuss which network services need to be available in modern networks.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
Feature-rich, next-generation networks help drive innovation and value to midsize companies and position them for competitive advantage. Next-generation networks give midsize companies a competitive advantage. By removing many of the operational headaches of running a network, Cisco’s solutions free up departments to focus on driving business value and innovation. Feature-rich, strategic networks built for today and tomorrow remove the barriers to growth and give midsize businesses the agility they require to lead their markets. Find out how by downloading this executive white paper.
A new enterprise architecture for delivering policy-based services has become available. This document discusses the need for a policy-based architecture in today’s enterprise networks and presents “Policy-Governed Network” architecture as a pragmatic business solution. Building identity and context awareness into the network is critical to implementing an effective infrastructure.
Major topics include:
● What policies are and who implements them
● Changing network dynamics and problematic new technologies
● Important challenges to implementers
● Characteristics of a Policy-Governed Network architecture
● Policy-implementation platform: the Cisco® Identity Services Engine
● Scenarios showing how policies can address specific network issues
● How to begin transitioning to a Policy-Governed Network
Access Control List or ACL are important tools in the configuration and customization of network attributes, especially with the Catalyst 6500. In the Catalyst 6500 upgrade with Sup2T, the TCAM has been both increased and its architecture improved. For ACL, a major concern was the lack of visibility of TCAM overflows when new ACL scripts were submitted, disrupting network operation. Therefore, Cisco developed the ACL Dry Run and ACL Atomic Commit to mitigate this scenario. To verify ACL improvements, we use ACL Dry-Run to assure that the TCAM would not overflow, and then implement the changes safely with ACL Atomic-commit; assuring no network interruption. It’s a great short video that verifies how useful these new tools are in ACL management.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
During the week of October 31, 2011, the Lippis Report tested Cisco System’s new Catalyst 6500 with Supervisor 2T or Sup2T for performance, upgradability, control and scalability at Ixia’s modern iSimCity laboratory in Santa Clara CA. By all counts, Cisco’s upgrade of the Catalyst 6500 via its new Sup2T, is its most ambitious and thoughtful yet for the venerable platform. The Sup2T is a major upgrade to the most widely-deployed switching platform in campus and data center networking. It’s the new Catalyst 6500’s network services that deliver most of the value, which is partially found in the Sup2T’s Policy Feature Card or PFC that increases NetFlow monitoring and a new TCAM design offering improved Access Control (ACL), Quality of Service design options, encryption security and many other features. This Lippis Report test verifies many of Cisco’s performance and upgradability claims. While it’s impossible to test all of the Catalyst 6500’s new 200-plus features with the Sup2T, we rather focus on a select few that will have the widest impact on IT business leaders’ product acquisition decision process.
MACsec encryption has become increasing popular and important to campus network design, but previous switch performance degraded when encrypted traffic was passing through it. Here we show that the catalyst 6500 does not suffer a performance degrade while MACsec traffic is passing through it. We tested the Catalyst 6500 via the cPacket Networks cTap 10G passive probe to verify traffic flows were either MACsec encrypted or unencrypted. We found that there is no material difference in throughput performance, other than 802.1ae encryption key overhead, thanks to 16 additional bytes per packet. The cPacket passive probe also measured line rate throughput performance. This is a great short video that verifies how the old encryption performance penalty is now gone.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
For IPv4 and IPv6, dual stack implementations are most popular where desktops and mobile devices run both IPv4 and IPv6, therefore, the network infrastructure needs to support both equally at high performance. IPv6 performance has not been on par with IPv4 until now. To demonstrate how the Catalyst 6500 upgrade with Sup2T has improved IPv6 performance, we measure IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and bidirectional traffic performance via RFC 2544. IP Multicast traffic has been on the rise, thanks to the increased use of video services within the enterprise. Therefore, we test IP Multicast performance via RFC 3918 on the new Catalyst 6500 Sup2T to stresses its packet replication ASIC built into the 6908-10G line cards. We find that the new Catalyst 6500 delivers equal Ipv4 and Ipv6 performance; a 2x increase from the Sup720 for IP unicast, bidirectional and multicast forwarding.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
One of the most impressive network design options available on the Catalyst 6500 is the use of VSS. Connecting two Catalyst 6500s equipped with Sup2Ts creates a virtual switch, adding each switch’s performance while operating as a single switch thus eliminating spanning tree in favor for active-active links. We configure two Catalyst 6500s via VSS. We measure throughput performance to verify that VSS throughput rates are equally high performance as the MPLS and VPLS scenarios. Check out the two-Catalyst 6500 configurations we deployed for this test.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
During the Lippis Report test of the Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 at Ixia’s iSimCity we perform an upgrade from Supervisor Engine 720 to 2T. What IT business leaders are looking for are incremental network upgrades with minimal disruption. Therefore, we swap out Sup720 for Sup2T and bring up existing service modules and line cards. Remember that line cards represent the largest investment in switching equipment, so we’ll demonstrate that older line cards interoperate at high performance when the new Sup2T replaces the Sup720. We find that the upgrade process is easy and smooth with compatibility of line cards, configuration code, service modules, transceivers and chassis.
Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.
IT business leaders are seeking data center fabrics that scale to support increasing density of physical and virtual servers at cloud spec. In October of this year, Cisco delivered a monster data center fabric announcement aimed at increasing scale, security and new data center services. A few highlights are the second-generation Nexus 7000 capabilities, a new Nexus 7009 platform, plus FabricPath capabilities on the Nexus 5500 and expanded Nexus 1GbE and 40GbE form factors of the Nexus 3000. Shashi Kiran, Director of Market Management for Data Center/Virtualization and Enterprise Switching at Cisco Systems joins me to talk about what IT business leaders will gain from this new announcement from a business outcome and data center fabric design perspective.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Cisco’s next generation NetFlow provides deep application visibility, detailed measurement plus increased control and security for IT departments that are struggling to get ahead of an Enterprise application portfolio that is undergoing a massive transition thanks to mobile and cloud computing. Samuel Pasquier, product manager for Cisco Systems, and Adam Powers, chief technology officer for Lancope discuss best practices for securing and gaining visibility to applications that are flowing over enterprise networks with the next generation of NetFlow.
It can be easy to forget how much depends on the enterprise network—until you have to tell the VP of sales that he can’t use his iPhone on the corporate network because the appropriate security controls aren’t in place. Or you must tell the CIO that expanding the virtualization initiative to include business-critical applications will severely tax bandwidth. The truth is, nearly everything in modern businesses is dependent on the enterprise network, and every decision you make is based on whether the network can handle it. This paper takes a look at a common pitfall in IT circles that can have a serious impact on the IT decision maker’s ability to say “yes” to new business initiatives. It also offers recommendations for IT organizations that wish to act as business enablers.
A third-party business consulting firm analyzed the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Cisco enterprise customer networks, and contrasted that TCO to “good enough” networks from other networking vendors. Key findings:
1) TCO is a better metric than CapEx to assess network cost because it considers the full impact on IT spend, including CapEx, services, labor, bandwidth and energy.
2) The Cisco Borderless Network Architecture can deliver up to 13% better TCO than a “good enough” network, offering compelling value for the strategic Cisco investment.
3) Even if architectural benefits are discounted in the analysis, Cisco is, at most, a 7% TCO premium over other vendors due to IT labor savings and extended product lifecycles from Cisco solutions.
4) The single biggest benefit of Cisco’s architectural approach is labor savings. Labor constitutes 50% of TCO and Cisco delivers 5% to 10% labor savings driven by unified wired and wireless and embedded security.
5) A quality network delivers business benefits beyond TCO, including improved network uptime, higher user productivity and a lower threat of security breaches.
