The Lippis Report

Two years after Cisco launched its Unified Computing System it has 5,400 customers, holds the #3 market share ranking for x86 blade servers WW, behind only HP and IBM, according to IDG and recently broke numerous world computing performance benchmark records. While UCS has leaped frog competitors with performance plus memory and I/O capacity the most important aspect of UCS is the business value it drives. I explore this topic with Todd Brannon, Senior Manager for UCS marketing at Cisco Systems about the vision and strategy of Cisco’s Fabric Compute and the value its customers are gaining from its use. Todd brings great customer examples to this podcast, which is a must for any IT leader evaluating a data center fabric.

Cisco’s Nexus Operating System that runs on the Nexus switches and evolved from Cisco’s MDS SAN-OS is a fundamental building block of its Data Center Fabric. Berna Devrim, Senior Manager of Data Center and Virtualization Marketing at Cisco Systems, discusses the next generation of Nexus OS designed to address the biggest data center issues. These issues are virtualization scale and mobility, cloud spec scale, LAN and SAN convergence plus operational efficiency. This is one of the best audio podcast we’ve produced, so sit back listen, learn and enjoy.

By Cisco Systems

CareCore National, a health benefit management concern, increased business agility by being able to launch new lines of business in just two weeks, down from six months. This business benefits were gained, in large part through the insight and leadership of IT executives and their deployment of Cisco’s Data Center Fabric architecture. This white paper describes how the CareCore National achieved this transformation.

By Cisco Systems

Avago Technologies is a manufacturer. Its IT business leaders accelerated batch processing by 30 to 40%, increased business flexibility and decreased operational cost by 40% while adding a third data center. This white paper describes how Avago Technologies achieved this transformation.

By Cisco Systems

Consider how central and critical the capabilities that the network provides are to business goals. In all other areas of the company, business leaders look to strategic thinking and innovation to pull the company ahead of its competitors. Why should the network be any different? The allure of the tactical is always present in any business. A “good-enough-for-now” network may solve some of the problems of today, but does it set up businesses to solve the problems of tomorrow? When the network fails to adapt to the challenges of the future, the business follows the same path. Taking a strategic approach to the network is not just a good idea. It makes business sense. This white paper argues the strategic importance of the corporate network to achieving business objectives.

Cisco has expanded it relationship with Fax over IP partner Sagemcom by integrating its XMediusFAX into Cisco’s Unity Connection and Cisco Unified Communication Manager (CUCM ) in its 8.0 update. Further, at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, the two announced interoperability testing with Cisco UCS Express (SRE-V). John Nikolopoulos, Marketing and Product Management Director at Sagemcom, discusses Sagemcom’s deepening relationship with Cisco and what it means to IT business leaders who manage branch office networks and communications.

Eric Murray, Senior Network Engineer at Kindred Healthcare, and Ashish Shah, Senior Product Manager, Data Center Switching Technology Group at Cisco Systems, discuss the value gain of data center convergence or a single Ethernet fabric to support IP datagram and storage traffic. In this podcast, Eric Murray shares his experience of deploying a converged data center while Ashish explains Cisco’s end-to-end Data Center LAN/SAN consolidation strategy. This is a fascinating discussion of data center network design with cost and benefit trade-offs. In short, Kindred Healthcare has saved many millions of dollars in capital spend plus operational cost, thanks to a reduction in the number of management points.

Cisco is the only large vertical IT supplier with compute, storage and deep networking capabilities making its data center offering unique. It’s Unified Network Services or UNS, Unified Computing System or UCS, Unified Fabric and policy based management make up the Cisco Data Center Fabric. In this Lippis Report podcast I talk with Shashi Kiran; Director of Market Management for Data Center/Virtualization at Cisco Systems about the vision and strategy of Cisco’s Data Center Fabric and the value its customers are gaining from its use.

by Cisco Systems

Cloud computing is gaining customer attention at a fascinating pace. An Infonetics research report published in early 2011 noted a significant increase in customers’ interest in cloud computing between 2009 and 2010—most of respondents indicated interest in 2010, up from only 10% in 2009. Many studies have concluded that software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are leading the way in adopting cloud computing. Meanwhile according to an April 2011 Forrester report, the third largest cloud category, platform as a service (PaaS) is predicted to surpass IaaS to become the second largest cloud category by 2014. But according to Forrester, security is one of the top barriers to cloud computing. This white paper details an approach to secure cloud computing to mitigate threats and increase its adoption.

This paper revisits the benefits of centralized 802.11n wireless LAN networks and describes the case for transforming the controller-based architecture to match market needs. Centralization of wireless LANs (WLANs) delivers networks that are easy to deploy, scale, and manage. A local-mode controller-based campus environment delivers increased device scalability and an interactive multimedia experience coupled with enhanced policy to manage the full range of mobile devices. A controller-based deployment using FlexConnect technology enables multisite, lean branches to manage the increased scale of deployments without additional increase in operational complexity.

By Ted Ritter Senior Research Analyst, Nemertes Research

The data center is undergoing tectonic shifts with virtualization the primary cause. Everything is moving faster within the data center—moving at the speed of virtualization—putting centers into a state of transition from physical to virtual, which can be long, complex and messy. At the same time, security models remain largely static, anchored by physical security devices. Not only does this put the organization at greater risk, it also puts in jeopardy the core benefits of virtualization. To address this, organizations need a security architecture delivering agile security and supporting the physical infrastructure, the virtual infrastructure, and all the transitional states in between the two. This requires a new security model seamlessly integrating existing security controls for physical infrastructure with comparable security controls for the virtual infrastructure. This new model requires virtualization security.

By Nick Lippis, the Lippis Report

IT business leaders are being confronted with a choice: either embrace users’ freedom or liberty to choose a mobile endpoint and applications that they deem appropriate to support their work, or dictate a limited number of supported mobile endpoints and applications in which employees must choose? At the center of this decision are security concerns and control as the number of mobile endpoints connecting into enterprise networks skyrocket. A larger secondary effect is that employees are downloading low cost (99 cents to $4.99) mobile applications, which is changing the mix of corporate application portfolios without IT visibility but user request for support. At the same time, video communications is expanding throughout the enterprise and the endpoints it supports. IT business leaders can avoid this difficult choice and offer users freedom to choose the mobile endpoint and applications of their liking, and still maintain security and control by deploying a Borderless Network. In this industry white paper, we review market dynamics shaping mobile computing plus video communications and how a Borderless Network offers user choice, IT management control and in the process, a more productive and agile workforce.

By Cisco Systems

In this paper, you will learn what the Medianet 2.2 components are and how they work together to:

● Reduce IT costs and the complexity of deploying video, voice and data as well as improve user experience;
● Provide much-improved visibility into the network to accelerate troubleshooting and the ability to assess the impact of voice, video and data on the network.

Written by Jim Metzler for Cisco Systems

The movement on the part of enterprises to adopt a Cloud-based service model combined with the growing interest on the part of IT organizations to provide an internal SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the services they provide creates tremendous opportunities for Communications Service Providers or CSPs. The primary opportunity is for CSPs to offer a wide range of network centric solutions that are supported by an SLA. CSPs are in a unique position to offer these solutions because, unlike the Internet, the Next Generation Networks (NGNs) that CSPs have deployed are capable of providing contracted levels of availability, delay, jitter and packet loss. This paper provides three recommendations for CSPs to capture Cloud-based service revenues.