The Lippis Report

September 26th, 2011

By all counts, Cisco’s upgrade of the Catalyst 6K via its new Supervisor 2T, or Sup2T, is its most ambitious and thoughtful yet for the venerable platform. The Sup2T is a 2 Terabit (Tb) platform that triples the previous Sup720 performance. Thanks to the support of Virtual Switching System (VSS), the platform allows two 2 Tbps switches to combine into a single 4 Tbps virtual switch. The Sup2T is a major upgrade to the most widely-deployed switching platform in campus and data center networking in the industry. But while these performance numbers are impressive, it’s the new Cat6K’s network services and pricing that deliver most of the value. From a services’ point of view, the Cat6K stands alone.

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September 26th, 2011

By Cisco Systems

Enterprise workspace is quickly evolving with new networked devices to improve communication, collaboration, security and productivity. Power over Ethernet (PoE), a way to deliver electrical power over LAN cabling to networked devices, has been widely deployed over the years to provide power to various endpoints. Cisco® Catalyst® 4500E, a market leader of PoE technology, continues to innovate to deliver Universal PoE (UPOE) technology with up to 60 watt power to enable even broader endpoint support, with additional benefits of higher availability, lower OpEx and faster deployment.

This paper provides an overview of the Cisco UPOE technology. It describes how Cisco has evolved PoE technology to UPOE, the use case examples of UPOE to simplify enterprise deployment, and UPOE architecture and operations.

September 12th, 2011

By Cisco Systems

Hundreds of Cisco customers have debated the trade-off of prioritizing the lowest price for a point product or service in their network over a strategic plan for how they architect their network infrastructure. Through interactions with many customers, Cisco has analyzed various network designs and implementations. Our findings show that although there is a place for building a low-cost tactical network, the ongoing operations, upgrades and lack of preparedness to meet new business challenges prove to be hindrances to organizations in the long run. Rather than just considering capital cost, organizations are well served to look at total cost of ownership, including operations and return on investment plus business capabilities enabled by a strategic network, as they build out their networks to address business needs today and tomorrow. Forrester Consulting Group provides an excellent analysis in this paper too.

August 23rd, 2011

On Tuesday Auguest 16th a week before HP’s news of potentially exiting the PC business, Zeus Kerravala, Senior VP of Research at the Yankee Group and Andre Kindness Senior Analyst at Forrester Research joined me in a round table discussion to reflect on HP Networking. We assess HP Networking’s progress since it announced the acquisition of 3Com back in Nov of 2009 and its prospects for the future. In a word our mutual assessment is disappointment with major short and long-term threats from Huawei. But there is hope for the future if HP can create a bold new vision for the industry and execute it. If you are going to listen to one podcast this year about HP, this should be it.

August 8th, 2011

By Nicholas John Lippis III

IT business leaders are demanding a unified policy-driven
management strategy for network access and security, mobile
endpoints including iPads, tablets and smartphones. A holistic
network approach is the unification of these management assets
to simplify operations and shift control to IT leaders. A holistic
network approach from Cisco Systems is to streamline NetOps
through the automated orchestration of policy, management and
infrastructure. In this model, network administrators will not have
to access multiple different management systems to collect data,
correlate it manually and then attempt to identify problem location.
One management system, Cisco Prime NCS with integrated
links to ISE delivers this service to NetOps drastically improving
network visibility and reducing troubleshooting time through a
client- or user-focused approach to managing corporate networks
in the age of mobile and cloud computing.

July 25th, 2011

By Cisco Systems

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Version 2.0 has been released, providing clarification and reinforcing the need for merchants and other organizations to identify all system components, people and processes to be included in a PCI DSS assessment. Simply achieving device and system compliance is not enough to protect your retail business and your customers. Cisco® PCI Solution for Retail 2.0 helps you:

• Address current PCI compliance requirements
• Protect customer data in your data center, stores, Internet edge, contact center and between partners, such as payment processors
• Simplify compliance
• Offer guidance on security best practices

July 25th, 2011

In Cisco’s Data Center Fabric, it has delivered a set of features and innovations that solve some of the most difficult networking challenges found in virtualized infrastructure. IP address and VM mobility plus adapter and VM Fabric EXtenders (FEX) offer increased support for virtualized data center infrastructure, offering designers flexibility to move virtualized assets independent of location. These innovations are proposed by Cisco that promises virtualization aware networking, lower cost and increased performance. Omar Sultan, Senior Manager, Data Center Architecture at Cisco Systems, and I discuss Cisco’s new data center virtualization tools.

July 13th, 2011

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.

July 11th, 2011

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.

July 11th, 2011

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.

July 11th, 2011

By Cisco Systems

The Apollo Group, owner of the University of Phoenix and other educational properties doubled the size of its network without an increase in IT staff, lowered per-port switching cost while increasing port volume and freed up several rows of space in its data centers. This white paper describes how the Apollo Group achieved this transformation.

July 11th, 2011

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.

July 11th, 2011

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.

July 11th, 2011

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.