The Lippis Report

By Cisco Systems

Cisco IT is transforming its data centers with solutions that help to realize the company’s Data Center 3.0 vision, which employs a unified network fabric to connect servers and storage devices in a way that is resilient, scalable, and easy to manage. The transformation occurs in three stages: 1) Consolidating I/O and increasing throughput by implementing unified I/O running on 10 Gigabit Ethernet (current stage); 2) Increasing the power available to compute resources by reducing the power consumed by the network infrastructure and; 3) Making applications location-independent, which will simplify changes and possibly eliminate the need for change requests

Learn how Cisco is deploying consolidated I/O in their data center by downloading this paper.

By Cisco Systems

Coca-Cola Bottling Company adopted 10 Gb Ethernet, consolidating from 80 servers to 4 and reducing cabling costs. Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated is the second largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, with territories in 11 states and serving more than 18 million consumers. The company makes, sells, and delivers carbonated and non-carbonated beverages. Low-cost servers, used for applications such as sales force automation and workgroup collaboration, had contributed to server sprawl, causing the data center to outgrow available power and cooling capacity. Server virtualization helped but had begun to slow network performance. “We wanted 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity without the expense of building a new data center,” says Rory Regan, network and telecom manager of Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated. “We decided to build a new data center network that would continue to work with our existing servers and storage as we gradually migrated to a unified fabric.”

Find out how Rory exploited 10Gb Ethernet to scale up its Data Center Virtualization project by downloading this paper.

By Cisco Systems

This security report from Cisco has become one of the industry’s more important views into security threats that are confronting the industry. The report also provides trend lines for specific threats which IT leaders need to develop mitigation strategies. The Cisco Mid-year Security Report presents an overview of Cisco security intelligence, highlighting threat information and trends from the first half of 2009. The report also includes recommendations from Cisco security experts and predictions on how identified trends will evolve.

Find out the largest security threats confronting IT leaders by downloading this paper.

By Cisco Systems

Mobility has become a business expectation. IT is coming face to face with an increasingly savvy user community which is demanding the wireless performance required to deliver a ubiquitous computing experience. Wireless technologies are striving to keep up, and the ratification of 802.11n promises to unleash the true power of mobility. This checklist provides prescriptive guidance on how IT can harness the value of 802.11n, while avoiding the pitfalls.
To integrate 802.11n into your enterprise network, follow these steps.

By Cisco Systems
Networks and related network standards have come a very long way over the last few decades. Could you imagine a world without ethernet? Or the Internet? Or wireless? Could you imagine the not-so-distant past in which your work location, user device, communications path, destination computer, and application/information access were defined by the network and not by you? In the present, imagine not being able to collaborate across locations or across company boundaries because of mismatched networks. Flash forward and imagine not being able to take advantage of developing cloud computing services because of connection and exchange barriers between your infrastructure and the cloud—any cloud. Hard to imagine, given the connected world within which we all work, live, play, and learn.
Find out how standards-based networking is opening up borderless networks.

There has been huge interest in Borderless Networks since Lippis Report 134. The following are links to Cisco’s site which cover Borderless Networks and its ISR G2 announcement. There is content here from other industry analysts and of course from Cisco as well.

Borderless Networks Experience – The World is Your Workspace
See business innovation in action as Cisco customers and executives discuss how Borderless Networks enables greater productivity, collaboration and efficiency.

Borderless Networks Experience

Borderless Networks

Building Tomorrow’s Borderless Business
Enable a new borderless workspace experience at remote offices with Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2

Integrated Services Routers

By Nick Lippis

A new era in Enterprise IT is emerging. It’s an era born out of systemic business efficiency planning prompted by the efforts of business leaders to reduce corporate spending as revenues declined during the market crash of 2008. To reduce operational spend, get closer to customers, automate new streamlined business processes and position their firms for the current economic recovery, IT leaders are reviewing IT solutions, particularly data center consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing and branch offices. In this white paper we describe the macro trends taking shape in business and explore how these trends are creating a new era in branch office IT fueled by cost reduction and improved customer experience. We review next generation branch office IT attributes and best practices to leverage their value.

This short Lippis Vidcast is on Cisco’s Borderless Networks architecture and its ISR G2 launch.

We live in an ever-increasingly connected world where our workspace is with us constantly, independent of geographic location and user device. The days of boundaries or obstacles to accessing information which location, applications and devices erected are limited and dwindling. These boundaries are being torn down by business necessity, personal preferences and technical innovations. Joel Conover, Senior Marketing Manager at Cisco Systems joins me to discuss Borderless Networks, a new Cisco network architecture which addresses today’s most complex IT challenges.

As businesses grow across borders, a new era in branch office IT is emerging, born out of systemic business efficiency planning prompted by the efforts of business leaders to reduce corporate spending as revenues declined during the market crash of 2008. To assist business and IT leaders in reducing operational spend, get closer to customers, automate new streamlined business processes and position their firms for the current economic recovery, Cisco has launched the second generation of Integrated Services Routers (ISR G2), their flagship branch office solution for Borderless Networks. Shashi Kiran, Senior Manager Network Systems and Security of Cisco Systems discusses macro business trends and explores how these trends are creating a new era in enterprise networks.

By Cisco Systems

This document addresses the recommendations listed in the “Information Supplement: PCI DSS Wireless Guideline.” The full guideline can be found at http://www.pcisecuritystandards.org. This document addresses these guidelines in relation to the Cisco Unified Wireless Network; it does not address Cisco’s autonomous or stand-alone access points in relation to the new PCI DSS Wireless Guideline.

Download it here.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported over 182,166 laboratory-confirmed cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza virus with 1,799 deaths. In June 2009 the WHO raised the pandemic alert level to six, signaling a pandemic of this influenza is underway. If the H1N1 virus is in full pandemic force during the fall and winter months of the flu season then an estimated 40 to 50 percent of the workforce could be affected. To assist business and IT leaders in developing strategies to mitigate the impact of pandemics and other natural or man-made disasters, I asked Samantha Ma, Security Solutions Manager at Cisco Systems to be my guest since she is an expert in business continuity preparation.

By Cisco Systems
Firewalls can provide a range of services to protect unified communications applications and servers, but need to be able to inspect encrypted signaling and media traffic. Beginning with Cisco ASA Software Release 8.0(4), Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances support both TLS Proxy and Phone Proxy for protecting unified communications solutions deployments. Cisco TLS Proxy provides secure interworking between the firewall and encrypted voice calls within the campus or branch network. Cisco Phone Proxy enables organizations to use the native phone encryption capability in Cisco IP phones to create secure calls from the Internet or externally connected phones. Phone Proxy can also be used to provide a secure VLAN traversal solution for Cisco IP Communicator soft phones on the data VLAN that are connecting to IP phones on the phone VLAN.

by Cisco Systems
The CiscoVirtual Office solution extends the Cisco routed intranet, via secure VPN Internet connections, into thousands of employees’ homes and, in the future, small offices. This case study describes the deployment of the Cisco Virtual Office solution within Cisco’s own network, an advanced enterprise environment that is one of the largest and most complex in the world. As of mid-2008, Cisco had more than 15,000 internal users for the Cisco Virtual Office solution. This deployment is yielding the benefits of increased employee productivity and job satisfaction, IT cost savings, and reductions in Cisco’s environmental impact. IT leaders can draw on Cisco IT’s real-world experience in this area to help support similar enterprise needs.

Find out how by downloading this white paper.