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Unique is the operator of Zurich Airport and offers a broad service portfolio to about 180 other companies, which also reside in the airport. Zurich Airport offers work for about 20,000 individuals and transports approximately 18 million passengers annually. Airport applications like air-traffic control and tower communications demand the highest uptime and need to be separated from operations like baggage distribution, business administration, video surveillance, and public WLAN traffic. Peter Zopfi, Head of Communication Engineering for Unique was confronted with building a network with tunable attributes that were as varied as the businesses that relied upon it. In this podcast Peter discusses what worked and didn’t and how a LAN based MPLS VPN Cisco Network Virtualization strategy was key to delivered business value to all businesses and operations at Zurich Airport. It’s a fascinating discussion that you don’t want to miss. Enjoy, Nick.

By Cisco Systems

The Cisco® Catalyst® 6500 is deployed in the most critical parts of enterprise and service provider networks. Having such a vital position in the network, the Cisco® Catalyst® 6500 must provide the highest levels of availability. To achieve these levels of availability network engineers employ both network-wide technologies as well as device-level redundancy. This includes network designs with redundant switches, redundant paths using Cisco EtherChannel® technology, First Hop Redundancy Protocols, the Cisco Virtual Switching System (VSS) and of course redundant system components including power supplies, fans and Supervisor modules.

This paper discusses the Redundant Supervisor technologies for the Cisco® Catalyst® 6500. These technologies have evolved over time from nonstateful, Route Processor Redundancy mode (RPR) to the current Stateful Switchover (SSO) mode with Nonstop Forwarding (NSF).

To understand how to build high available networks with SSO and NSF download this white paper.

Zeus Kerravala of Yankee joins me to discuss the many changes occurring in the industry including Nortel’s liquidation and Cisco’s huge influence over the industry as it reshapes to respond to its UCS and data center 3.0 initiatives. We discuss HP’s new relationships with MSFT and Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, Enterasys, Extreme, Force10, IBM, Juniper, and much more. We talk winners and losers and provide insight into the major trends that are focusing on new corporate IT buying behavior. Enjoy.

The spring business cycle in our industry brought HP and Microsoft closer together, Avaya’s launch of Aura, Cisco’s go-to-market strategy for its unified computing system (UCS), Brocade’s 8000 FCoE switch launch, 3Com/H3C’s new 12500 data center core switch and re-emergence into the enterprise market, Voltaire’s entry into the ethernet data center market and much more. With the stocks of many networking companies trading higher than before the crash of 2008, it’s becoming clear that the efficiency gains of IT will play a major role in the fall economic up turn. With that in mind I review the major spring launches and provide my assessment.

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By Cisco Systems

Server virtualization, part of the Cisco ® Unified Computing System, leads to significant cost savings, helping organizations address space, power, cooling, and budget constraints. The current global economic climate presents an opportune time to fully utilize the benefits of virtualization technologies beyond the data center to achieve greater cost savings through increasing network utilization and efficiency. Network virtualization simplifies how IT departments manage entire campus networks. It offers management and cost benefits for increasingly complex, consolidated networks. Fortunately, the technologies for virtualizing network services throughout the campus network are mature and well understood. Modern campus network architectures support many services, scalable to hundreds of nodes and thousands of users. Administrators need to segment the campus networks for security and traffic management reasons, and traditional switching solutions are insufficient to meet these needs.

To find out about network virtualization and how your company can benefit from it download this white paper.

By Cisco Systems

As the global economy slowed in 2008, then came to a screeching halt in 2009, it sent a wave of change through the IT community. A mind shift gradually began to take place and CIOs found themselves pausing and reevaluating their investment decisions, realizing that now was the time to make sure every investment being made was not only in line with their company’s strategic vision, but also driving them diligently toward their goals. Smart CIOs have become more strategically minded and are positioning their companies to thrive after surviving these tough economic times. This white paper provides market data based upon CIO interviews of IT projects now being funded and viewed as strategic.

To see if your priority of budgeted IT projects are strategic download this white paper.

According to Frost and Sullivan’s July 2008 World Web Conferencing Services Forecast, the web collaboration market is expected to grow at 22.5% CAGR through 2013! That’s the good news. In larger organizations that use web conferencing for a mix of internal, external and a combination of sessions there is growing evidence that WAN bandwidth is being heavily consumed. To significantly reduce WAN bandwidth cost while Web conferencing load increases, Cisco has offered a hybrid model by introducing the WebEx Node for the ASR 1000. Tere’ Bracco, Senior Marketing Manager for Network Systems and Security at Cisco joins the program to discuss web conferencing trends and the new hybrid model for WebEx.

During this downturn Cisco has taken the opportunity to launch initiatives that rivals simply do not have the scale and wherewithal to deliver. Cisco is delivering well thought out solutions to big problems with its smart grid initiative, EnergyWise energy management, Unified Computing System (UCS), collaboration, and now IT security. At RSA Cisco launched its Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) that leverages its presence in service provider and enterprise networks to deliver a global correlation of threats and in the process offers the deepest and widest range of IT security defenses available in the industry. SIO is in essence a “security cloud” service capable of identifying threats propagating throughout the internet and intranets before corporate networks are infected by transmitting mitigating code to enterprise security devices such as IPS, firewall, Web and email systems.

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By Cisco Systems

This short three page At-A-Glance paper provides a quick description of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations. Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) is an advanced security i

By Cisco Systems

Innovations such as virtualization, cloud computing, and web-based access for employees, partners, and customers are bringing about a dramatic evolution in nearly every organization’s infrastructure. Many organizations are also transitioning from physical-based collaboration processes to collaborating across geographies by building distributed networks to gain a time-to-market advantage. Web 2.0 technologies, mobility, social networking and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are creating new ways to work and collaborate, and to reach out to customers and partners.

From a security standpoint, these changes have brought with them new and complex challenges. Traditional point security tools are limited in their ability to support and secure this business transformation, either leaving critical new resources unprotected or preventing the deployment of new services as they do not secure new processes and protocols. At the same time, organizations are facing a host of new threats that target many of these new services and impact network and service availability.

Find out how to protect your organization without restricting use of new productive IT solutions by downloading this paper.

By Nick Lippis, Lippis Consulting

Along with a turbulent macroeconomic cycle comes business rationalization and in networking the wide area offers a unique opportunity to deliver value, both in terms of operational efficiency and business initiative alignment. Advances in network-embedded, software-based WAN Services such as security, unified communications (UC) and WAN optimization are starting to deliver the same type of application experience and management tools to control application performance that was once only available over the LAN. But the wide area network has been pieced together, usually site by site, without a comprehensive plan. This lack of planning is most acute in branch-office-to-WAN and data center connections as geographically distributed branches are connected with inconsistent WAN Services and indigenous WAN transport. IT planners are being offered an opportunity to implement a common set of WAN Services embedded within routers such as UC, WAN optimization, security etc., between branch, headquarter and data center sites which promises to lower operational spend, align business initiatives and policy while delivering Local Area Networks (LANs) -like application performance. This paper presents a strategy for common WAN Services embedded in routers connecting branch offices to data centers and larger corporate sites that speed up workflow and business process for all employees independent of geographic location.

Learn about WAN Advantage by downloading this white paper.

Today’s collaborative infrastructure and evolving security landscape brings an abundance of risk. Newly adopted IT tools and services, often untried and vulnerable, allow cybercriminals to exploit them to sabotage or gain financially. The newest wave of threats such as Conficker, McColo, Srizbi etc often target personal data propagating via multiple blended vehicles such as web, email, and USB keys to bypass legacy security tools. Even strong security technologies are often unable to keep up with today’s attacks: they are too nimble, specialized, and targeted. Cisco’s new Security Intelligence Operations or SIO offering identifies threats in real time via global correlation so that businesses can be more secure in their IT defenses. Ambika Gadre, Director Product Marketing in the Cisco Security Technology Business Unit discusses SIO, reputation scoring, global correlation and a powerful approach to mitigating blended exploits from infecting your corporation.

Marlowe Fenne, Cisco Systems Solutions Marketing Manager in the Network Systems group, joins me to talk about the IT Innovations forum and Cisco’s spring announcements. We discuss the business results of exploiting WAN Advantage, Webex Node, Virtual Connect, Security, Unified Communications, AXP, Switching, H1N1’s reminder of the importance of telecommuting and much more. Marlowe also provides a sneak preview of the May 7th IT Innovations Forum at which I present and you can attend for free at http://www.ciscoitinnovationsforum.com.

According to various industry sources, branch office users comprise 30 to 90 percent of enterprise employees globally, with remote locations and users consuming 70 to 90 percent of business resources. To be successful, these employees require access to the same applications, systems, and tools as employees located at a corporate headquarters. At the same time, business continuity is accelerating resource centralization, with more and more critical assets moving into the enterprise headquarters and data center. To meet regulatory compliance and cost control requirements, many organizations are optimizing resources and reducing complexity in the branch office. Although centralizing branch resources and increasing access brings great benefits, it can also pose security, latency, and performance challenges. Branch office networks need to be secure, available, remotely manageable, and extensible — and they must deliver application performance and quality of experience that is as good as it is in the main offices.

This white paper offers strategies to optimize branch office networks when conflicting requirements are present. Find out how by downloading this paper