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by Cisco Systems

Every manager faces the prospect of an operations breakdown. That is the risk of doing business in an uncertain world. But business resiliency implies more than successfully coping with disasters and disruptions when they occur. Managers need to give their employees the knowledge, means and confidence to overcome, and even take advantage of, the potential risks that pervade the business environment. A successful business resiliency program involves anticipating and preparing for the major disruptive threat exposures that any company faces, while taking a risk-adjusted, capital-allocation-based approach to managing risks. With foresight and proper planning, organizations can develop a level of resilience that allows them to withstand any emergency that could put their people and business in jeopardy.
Find out how by downloading this white paper.

Unified Communications (UC) as an integrated launch point to multiple communications applications will swiftly fade as UC is integrated into corporate social networking and collaboration applications. This is the impression I walked away with after the Orlando VoiceCon industry event. The implication of this is systemic, sending change throughout the industry from suppliers, buyers, and even industry event organizers. What I mean is that UC as a standalone desktop application has limited value. IT and business leaders are pressing suppliers to improve user experience and in the process productivity.

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By Siemens Enterprise Communications

This paper defines different telecommuting models and shows how companies are telecommuting across the globe. Lastly, it will demonstrate how Siemens Enterprise Communications Group has significantly cut expenses by adopting green telecommuting and how you can do the same.

Download this white paper to find out how to reduce cost by leveraging telecommuting.

By Foundry Networks

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) as a technology has been around for over a decade and has been used extensively in several service provider networks world-wide. Over the last few years, the standardization of applications such as VPN technologies over MPLS has opened the door for this technology to be used in an enterprise network. This paper explores the use of MPLS in an enterprise network and its associated benefits of lower cost and increased security.

Find out how to use MLPS in your enterprise WAN by downloading this paper.

By Ruckus Wireless

Faced with a population of over 16,000 students, limited resources and WiFi-enabled devices of all shapes and sizes, the Delta School District (Delta) recognized it was time to take action in finding a simple, streamlined solution to their growing wireless needs. Delta needed to deploy a reliable wireless infrastructure in each of its schools to accommodate a variety of applications, such as supporting small-footprint laptops provided to special need students, video surveillance, tablet computers, mobile computing carts equipped with laptops, back-office applications and even the ability to control school heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

By Cisco Systems and The City of Dublin, Ohio

The city of Dublin, Ohio is home to more than 3,000 businesses, and continually strives to create an attractive economic environment. Information technology plays an important role in Dublin's efforts to bring the best and most promising businesses to the city, and it was important to provide access anytime, anywhere. "œA major emphasis has always been enhancing economic development and establishing a significant tax base that will take us into the future," says Mayor Marilee Chinnici-Zuercher. "œAccess to technology is a key element of our strategy, because we have a lot of small businesses that are global in their missions and purposes." Adds Jane Brautigam, City Manager, "œWe believe that providing better access to the Internet, via our network infrastructure, will bring companies to the city, and encourage them to grow their business here."

The Cisco mobility group has always had the broadest view and product portfolio for mobility solutions. Their definition of mobility expands beyond wireless LANs to include cellular, VPNs, and location services. But last week the Cisco mobility group elevated their value proposition beyond physical and geographic independent networked computing with the launch of Cisco Motion. Cisco Motion offers the broadest technical and business architecture for mobile networks and communications positioning Cisco far from its smaller WLAN competitors such as Aruba, Meru, Trapeze, et al.

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By Ruckus Wireless

Businesses are struggling with the complexity and cost of installing and managing large-scale WLANs. Wi-Fi meshing is a solution to this problem. An enterprise mesh WLAN is made up of a group of cooperating APs, only some of which are directly attached to Ethernet. The APs form a wireless topology to route client traffic between any member of the mesh and the wired network. Meshing greatly reduces, if not eliminates, WLAN cabling costs and delays as well as AP placement constraints. But despite these compelling benefits, most enterprises have not overcome their concerns over the performance, reliability and complexity of mesh WLANs to take advantage of it on a broad scale.

By Ruckus Wireless

With physical data rates up to 600Mbps, many believe that 802.11n will replace wired networks within the enterprise and at home. But there's significant disparity between the 802.11n promise and the actual throughput experienced by users of the current generation of 802.11n systems. The most overlooked and under-optimized aspect of commercial 802.11n systems is the control over radio frequency (RF) variability. A robust, responsive RF layer is central to wireless network performance, particularly for Wi-Fi which operates in the open spectrum. It is ironic that most of the system products based on 802.11n, designed to make maximum use of the RF domain, do little in this regard beyond integrating more radio chains and antennas.

Ruckus Wireless Smart Wi-Fi technology combines advances in miniaturized multi-element antenna design and sophisticated RF routing software to direct signals onto the best paths in real time to deliver the highest possible performance and reliability in ever changing RF conditions. It also features client- and media-intelligent QoS to optimize multimedia transmissions. With 802.11n, Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi has been extended to optimize antenna operations with multiple radios and intelligent channel utilization software to overcome many of the challenges in realizing 802.11n's true potential.

By Extreme Networks

Wireless LANs have become pervasive in today's business environment. Mobile applications are driving innovations in wireless LAN technology as the exponential growth in users has put increasing demands on wireless bandwidth. This paper discusses the emerging 802.11n WLAN technology and suggests migration strategies for Enterprise customers.

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 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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802.11n offers impressive improvements in rate, range, and price/performance thanks to significantly higher processing and power consumption than older WLAN Access Points (APs). A key question in the decision to deploy 802.11n APs is whether there is enough power delivered over 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch ports or compliant power injectors to run these Aps, since 802.11n's increased bandwidth and processing may require more than the 12.95 Watts provided in 802.3af switch ports. I interview Craig Mathias, a Principal at Farpoint Group and author of the recent report “802.11n Access Points and Power over Ethernet: Key Considerations” and Luc Roy, VP of Enterprise Mobility at Siemens Enterprise Communications which is shipping an 802.11n AP that operates with 802.3af PoE. Craig tested the Siemens AP3620 802.11n APs and shares the results.

By Cisco Systems

As the network has become an integral part of the enterprise and small- to medium-sized business, new applications have added new devices onto the network infrastructure. From IP telephony clients to new IEEE 802.11n wireless access points, the requirement to provide increasing levels of power to network end devices has grown dramatically. Cisco® was the first to develop the capability of providing power network end-points when it enabled power from an Ethernet switch port to its Cisco IP phone. From there, Cisco began work with numerous other vendors within the IEEE to create a standards-based means of providing Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE is now a widely adopted IEEE 802.3af standard. Cisco Enhanced PoE is Cisco's extension to the IEEE 802.3af standard that supplies greater amounts of power per port. By expanding its PoE support to deliver more than 15.4 watts (W) per port, Cisco offers greater flexibility and mobility to users while offering greater operational manageability to network managers.