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 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.

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.

By Gartner

This document evaluates the potential benefits and drawbacks of converging data center networks and debunks a myth about lower costs and complexity. It includes quantitative analysis, along with insights gained from discussions with Gartner clients about organizational issues that affect convergence decisions.

By Cisco Systems

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, about 200 million households use Wi-Fi networks, and there are about 750,000 Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide. Wi-Fi is used by over 700 million people, and there are about 800 million new Wi-Fi devices every year. Cisco has shipped over 10 million access points worldwide. In this white paper, Cisco details how Wi-Fi hotspots are changing to accommodate cellular offload of iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

By Cisco Systems

Deploying network services in virtual data centers is extremely challenging. Traditionally, such Layer 4 through 7 services relied on intrusive, inline deployment and static network topologies. They were thus completely at odds with highly scalable virtual data center designs with mobile workloads, on-demand virtual machine (VM) provisioning, and strict service-level agreements (SLAs).

Cisco® Unified Network Services (UNS) addresses all of these problems by creating a framework for multiple services that can be configured and provisioned on demand, dynamically, to suit the service needs of enterprise applications and cloud users. This dramatically reduces network management overhead, allowing for a much more agile data center and business while providing improved application performance and a secure infrastructure. Cisco UNS comprises Cisco’s industry-leading solutions for virtual data centers that deliver.

● Load balancing and application controllers
● WAN acceleration
● Network security
● Network analysis and monitoring

Adding new applications in a data center has become highly complex thanks to routing paths set-up to provide connectivity/reach of Layer 4-7 network services and their associated configuration and policy set-up for specific applications. Then, once the application is operational it’s hard to virtualize it and move it via v-motion while keeping set-up and policies intact especially routing paths. This is a difficult problem riddled with complexity and associated cross-administrative operational cost limiting the number of applications that can be virtualized. A fundamental new approach to networking is needed to solve this and Cisco has been thinking about it for some time now. In this Lippis Report podcast I talk with Gary Kinghorn Product Marketing Manager Data Center Solutions Marketing at Cisco Systems as we discuss Cisco’s Unified Network Services strategy.

By BLADE Network Technologies, an IBM Company

Server virtualization brings both benefits and drawbacks to the data center: it can maximize underutilized resources and minimize infrastructure spending—but add complexity and administrative overhead for the network administrator. BLADE Network Technologies’ VMready™ software addresses this problem by automatically migrating network policies along with virtual machines as they migrate across different physical servers.

Find out how by downloading this white paper

Avaya has developed a unique approach to branch office networking with the introduction of its Advanced Gateway 2330. Previous to Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business, its branch office solution was focused on communications, but now it has computer-networking capabilities that is manifesting into a powerful branch office portfolio offering. I talk with Michael Fitzgerald, Portfolio Leader of the Unified Branch at Avaya, about Avaya’s investment in branch office networking with particular focus on network designs its approach affords.

Enjoy, Nick

Our industry is ramping up to build private and public cloud infrastructure, but IT architects do not have comparative 10Gigabit Ethernet Switch performance information to assist them in purchase decisions and product differentiation. New data center Ethernet fabric network design requires low latency, high performance under north-south plus east-west flows, low power consumption and minimum number of network tiers. During past industry cycles open industry tests contributed to growing the network market by shortening sales cycles due to the elimination of IT departments conducting internal performance test. In addition, performance question obstacles were eliminated during the sales cycle thanks to reliable industry data being available, speeding up market adoption. This was true in the LAN plus bridge/router industry battles as well as every major Ethernet switch evolution. There is no broad industry comparative 10GE modular switch performance test available.

Lippis Enterprises has developed a series of open industry performance tests and teamed with Ixia for their execution. The goal of the test is to provide the industry with comparative performance test data across all 10Gigabit Ethernet switch providers. While the main test is focused on modular switching products, fixed configuration switches are welcome too. The final test report will profile each supplier and segment products based upon modular or fixed configuration.

Download the prospectus now and sign up while there’s still room

By HP Networking

The fundamental nature of data center computing is rapidly changing. The traditional model of separately provisioned and maintained server, storage, and network resources are constraining data center agility and pushing budget envelopes to the limit. IT organizations recognize that these static pools of isolated resources are being underutilized, a problem that can be exacerbated when dedicated infrastructure or computer systems are used to support different classes of data center workloads. One response has been for IT organizations to adopt virtualization and blade technologies, which enable a more flexible and highly utilized infrastructure. These new, more scalable technologies can be dynamically provisioned to meet continuously evolving business requirements. At the same time, these technologies apply new pressures to the multiple networks in the data center, further worsening spend issues. And it increases the burden on the IT teams that support them.

Learn how to avoid these data center problems with HP FlexFabric by downloading this white paper:

This vidcast is a short video presentation on two and three tier network fabrics for high end data centers. Cisco’s FabricPath Switching System and F-Series module for the Nexus 7000 are reviewed along with a case study

By Arista Networks

For many years, networks have been oversubscribed. Such oversubscription was tolerable in enterprise networks as the applications were not bandwidth intensive, but not anymore. In a datacenter, the primary reason for this oversubscription is insufficient uplink bandwidth from each rack. Each top-of-rack switch is typically connected to two aggregation switches for redundancy. However, half the uplinks are blocked by spanning tree to avoid loops in the network; this reduces the available bandwidth between the rack and aggregation layer of the network by 50%. Arista’s Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) feature removes this bottleneck and allows the utilization of all interconnects.

To learn how, download this paper from Arista Networks.

By Cisco Systems

A system wide feature of the Cisco Unified Wireless Network, CleanAir technology improves air quality by:
– Detecting RF interference that other systems can’t see
- Identifying the source and locating it on a floor plan
- Providing automatic adjustments to optimize wireless coverage around the interference

CleanAir technology provides the following benefits:
- Self-healing and self-optimizing wireless networks
- Faster troubleshooting for less downtime
- Effective policy enforcement

Layer 1 security

See how CleanAir technology avoids interference and speeds troubleshooting by watching this short video