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Total cost of ownership (TCO) is always a difficult metric to measure. So many business and IT leaders focus on purchase price or product acquisition without giving full attention to operational and facilities cost, which dominate network TCO. Conventional wisdom is that for LAN and WLAN switching acquisition cost represents between 20 to 25% of TCO with operational and facilities spend representing between 75 to 80% over a 3-year period. So the question is what can IT leaders do to optimize TCO and bring balance to network acquisition and operations? Scott Lucas, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing for Extreme Networks is my guest as we discuss best practices to balance TCO.

By Cisco Systems

Sanford Health launches ambitious initiatives for expansion and integration of healthcare services with Cisco advanced network. Sanford Health serves nearly 100 communities, covering roughly 80,000 square miles across South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska. It is the largest healthcare system between the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis and Denver and serves an average of 30,000 in-patient and one million outpatient visits annually. Sanford Health has spawned an extraordinary vision for new healthcare initiatives, including developing a world- class clinical research and education program and the creation of a multi-faceted initiative focused on the health and well-being of children. Arlyn Broekhuis, Sanford vice president and CIO, knew that this vision for the future of healthcare would require an equally forward-looking technology foundation to enable continual advances. Scott Sylliaasen, network security manager, was brought on board to oversee a complete upgrade of the network infrastructure. "œSanford is creating one of the few truly integrated, comprehensive health systems in the nation," says Sylliaasen. "œWe needed a robust, unifying network that would support our picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and electronic medical record (EMR) applications, as well as telemedicine and unified communications in the future."

On Jan 28th Cisco announced its Nexus data center high performance switch while the day after Juniper announced its long awaited arrival into the LAN switching market with its EX-Series of Ethernet switches internally called Hurricane. Zeus Kerravala, of The Yankee Group and I analyze Juniper's LAN switches and Cisco's new Nexus 7000 data center switch. It's a 20 minute podcast, but its worth the time. Enjoy, Nick

A warm Happy Holiday wish to all Lippis Report subscribers, supporters and their families. We have a special Lippis Report for you. Zeus Kerravala and I review the important and game-changing trends of 2007 and predict what 2008 has in store for business and IT leaders. We then take a further look out to 2012 and paint a picture of what the industry will look like. We provide this analysis in both written and podcast formats.

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By Cisco Systems

This white paper extensively reviews many of the server virtualization hosting benefits offered by VMware, the added value of Cisco network services in scaling virtual machines when hosting business critical and Internet-facing applications, and a real-time integrated provisioning approach between VMware’s VirtualCenter management platform and the recently released Cisco VFrame Data Center (VFrame DC) service orchestration platform. This is one of the most important changes in IT service delivery.

By Nick Lippis, Publisher of The Lippis Report

Business and IT leaders have been demanding an IT infrastructure which is more dynamic and responsive to the quick pace of business while being less costly. By dynamic they mean the ability to deliver new applications at the speed in which to be responsive to market dynamics while creating competitive differentiation. For many, IT expenditures as a percentage of revenue are to be managed down. To address these industry requirements IT suppliers have offered virtualization technology and services. Network virtualization represents a new IT paradigm, which challenges existing assumptions and IT deployment models. In this paper we explore network virtualization as a strategy to make corporations more agile and IT expenditure efficient. Network virtualization is presented as a new approach to network design and IT service delivery. Its main four building blocks are presented along with guiding deployment principals.