Archivo de la categoría: Networking

China, Cisco, Enterprise IT, Inspur, Networking, Networks, News & Analysis

Cisco strengthens China operations with Inspur joint venture

Cisco corporateCisco Systems is to form a joint venture with Chinese server maker Inspur, selling networking and cloud computing products in China. Cisco and Inspur will jointly invest $100 million in the project.

The partnership comes in the face of mutual suspicion between the US and Chinese government amid claims and counter claims of state sponsored cyber security threats.

In June Cisco was forced to remove several of its senior executives in China, amid reports of falling sales slide and Chinese government fears about the foreign ownership of networking equipment.

Cisco’s China sales fell 20 per cent on the previous year in the quarter ending on April 25 at a time when its global revenue gained 5.1 per cent. As its share of the Chinese router market fell from 21.2 per cent to 9.4 per cent the lost sales went to local rival Huawei Technologies, according to Bernstein Research.

Direct selling became more challenging, The Wall Street Journal has reported, after US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden said the NSA put surveillance tools in US technology products sold overseas.

US-Chinese technology company partnerships are growing in number and Microsoft announced on Thursday an alliance with Baidu and the Chinese state-owned private investment firm Tsinghua Unigroup on cloud technology. Last week Dell unveiled plans to invest $125 billion over five years in China. Earlier this year, IBM pledged to help develop China’s advanced chip industry with a ‘Made with China’ strategy, while chipmakers Intel and Qualcomm are developing chips with smaller Chinese companies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrived in Seattle this morning on a state visit to the US.

Chinese officials have said the partnerships will follow the pattern of car manufacturing agreements in the past, with foreign technology firms granted market access in return for shared technology and co-operation with Chinese industry.

Featured, Network Infrastructure, Networking, wireless

The Second Wave of Wireless: MU-MIMO, More Data & Bigger Pipes

There have been some big changes around Wave 2 Wireless Technologies. Most of these were discussed out at Cisco Live, which I was lucky enough to attend. A new technology called MU-MIMO has been introduced. It means multiple user, multiple input, multiple output. MU-MIMO allows us to dynamically allocate space allowing multiple users to do multiple transitions and getting more data and more sessions moving at the same time. We’re also soon going to have 2.3 gigabit/second threshold. We will be moving tons more data through the wireless space! This is going to require bigger pipes to backhaul all of this information. Check out my short video below where I discuss these topics in more detail!

 

 

Are you interested in learning more about the next wave of wireless technologies? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

 

 

By Dan Allen, Architect

Cisco, Cisco ACI, Featured, Network Infrastructure, Networking, Public Cloud, SDN

Part 2: Cisco Live 2015 Recap – AWS Direct Connect, VIRL Facelift & More!

It was another great Cisco Live event this year! My colleague Dan Allen wrote a post summarizing the key takeaways he got out of the event. I wanted to add in some of my own to supplement his. As you probably know, it was John Chambers last Cisco Live event as CEO – which makes it especially cool that I got this picture taken with him!

cisco live

Expanded DevNet Zone

Last year Cisco introduced the DevNet zone which was focused on giving people hands on access to Cisco’s most ground breaking technology that could be construed as science fiction unless they opened their toy box and let people see and touch what they’ve been hiding in it. This year we got to play with Internet of Things development environments, API driven SDN solutions, virtual network simulation toolkits and drone technologies hosted by the co-founder of iRobot. Last year, it was 4 little booths in between two restrooms with giveaways to get people to come in. This year, it consumed a whole section of the convention center with over 20 booths, 6 interactive labs and different exhibits and guest speakers delivering presentations on the future of technology.

Programmability and automation were a part of every session no matter what the topic was

It didn’t matter if you were attending entry-level or advanced breakout sessions, IT management track courses or developer workshops; everything you attended at Cisco Live this year had something to do with automation, programmability, cloud connectivity or application awareness. This was very different from any of the 8 Cisco Live events I’ve attended throughout my career. If you’re a technologist and have any doubt in your mind that this is where the industry is headed, you’d better start learning new skills because, like it or not, our customers and the customers of our customers are, or will soon be, believers and consumers of these technologies and consumption models.

Cisco and Amazon TEAM up to BEEF up AWS Direct Connect

AWS Direct Connect is a part of Amazon’s APN Partner program that consists of ISP’s that provide WAN circuits directly connected to AWS datacenters. That means if you’re a Level3 or AT&T MPLS customer and you have 10 offices and 2 datacenters on that MPLS network, Amazon AWS can now become another site on that private WAN. That’s HUGE! Just look at a small portion of their ISP partner list:

  • AT&T
  • Cinenet
  • Datapipe
  • Equinix, Inc.
  • FiberLight
  • Fiber Internet Center
  • First Communications
  • Global Capacity
  • Global Switch
  • Global Telecom & Technology, Inc. (GTT)
  • Interxion
  • InterCloud
  • Level 3 Communications, Inc.
  • Lightower
  • Masergy
  • Maxis
  • Megaport
  • MTN Business
  • NTT Communications Corporation
  • Sinnet
  • Sohonet
  • Switch SUPERNAP
  • Tata Communications
  • tw telecom
  • Verizon
  • Vocus
  • XO Communications

 

Combine that with a CSR1000v and an ASAv and you have a public cloud that can be managed and utilized exactly like a physical colo that is completely transparent to both your network teams and users.

ASAv in AWS

This little announcement slipped under the radar when it was made a week before Cisco Live but was definitely front and center in the Cisco Solutions Theater in the world of solutions. The ASA1000v has been Cisco’s only answer to a full featured virtual security appliance for the past two years or so. The only problem is that it required the Nexus1000v with which the industry as a whole has been reluctant to embrace (particularly in the public cloud space). Well good news, the ASAv doesn’t require the Nexus 1000v and, therefore, has opened the doors for the likes of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure to let us make use of an all Cisco Internet and WAN edge within an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This means you can manage the edge of your AWS VPC the same way you manage the edge of your datacenters and offices. The ASAv supports everything an ASA supports which will soon include the full FirePower feature set. Have you ever tried building a VPN tunnel to an ASA at a customer’s datacenter from the AWS VPC Customer Gateway? I have – not the best experience. Well, not any more – it’s pretty cool!

ACI was big this year, but not as big as last year

I was expecting more of the same from last year on this one. Just about everywhere you looked last year, you saw something about ACI. This year was a more targeted effort both with the breakout session and in the Cisco Solutions Theater. I’m not saying it didn’t get a lot of attention, just not as much as last year and certainly not more. This shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise for anyone used to Cisco’s marketing and positioning tactics, however. Last year was geared toward awareness of the new technology and this year was more geared toward the application of the technology across very specific use cases and advances in it’s capabilities. The honeymoon is clearly over and everyone was focused on how to live every-day life with ACI being a part of it.

APIC can interact with ASA and other non-Cisco devices

The ACI APIC is slowly getting more and more abilities related to northbound programmatic interaction with other Cisco and non-Cisco appliances. For example, it can now instantiate policies and other configuration elements of ASA, Fortigate, F5 and Radware appliances as part of its policy driven infrastructures.

iWAN almost officially tested and supported on CSR1000v

As of next month, the iWAN suite of technologies will be officially tested and supported on the CSR1000v platform which means all of that functionality will now be available in public cloud environments. More to come on iWAN in another post.

CSR1000v

The CSR1000v (Cloud Services Router) is Cisco’s answer to a virtual router. Until now, it’s been sort of an “Oh ya? We can do that too” sort of project. Now it’s a full-fledged product with a dedicated product team. It’s supported across just about every public cloud provider and in every Cisco Powered Cloud partner (Cirrity, Peak 10, etc.).

Additionally, I managed to get the product team to pull back the covers on the roadmap a bit and reveal what Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN) will be supported on the CSR1000v soon along with a number of other ISR/ASR features which will make a truly seamless WAN that includes your public cloud resources.

Non-Cisco Cloud News – Azure Virtual Network now supports custom gateways

A big challenge in real adoption of non-Microsoft application workloads in Azure has been the inability to use anything but Azure’s gateway services at the edge of your Azure Virtual Network. Well, Cisco let the cat out of the bag on this one as Cisco CSR’s and ASR’s will soon be supported as gateway devices in Azure VN. For me, this really brings Azure into focus when selecting a public cloud partner.

APIC-EM has more uses than ever

Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module (rolls right off the tongue right?), or APIC-EM, is Cisco’s answer to an SDN controller. It’s part of Cisco’s ONE software portfolio and has more uses than ever. Don’t confuse the APIC-EM with the ACI APIC, however. The ACI APIC is the controller and central point of interaction for Cisco’s ACI solution and runs on Cisco C-Series servers. The APIC-EM, however, is truly an open source SDN controller that is free and can run as a VM and interact with just about anything that has an API. That’s right.

VIRL got a facelift

Cisco’s Virtual Internet Routing Lab (VIRL) is getting some real attention. It’s an application that was unveiled to Cisco DevNet partners last year that lets you virtually build Cisco networks with VM’s running real IOS and NX-OS code to simulate a design and test it’s functionality. As a partner, this is huge as we can virtually replicate customer environments as a proof of concept or troubleshooting tool. It’s getting more development support within Cisco.

 

A lot of crucial information and updates came out of this event. If you would like to discuss any in more detail, feel free to reach out!

 

By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect

blade server, Datacentre, Marc Rouanne, Networking, News & Analysis, NFV, Open Source, OpenStack, Phil Twist, Vendor

Nokia eyes the cloud infrastructure market with OpenStack, VMware-based servers

Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world

Nokia is offering up its own blade servers to the telco world

Nokia Networks revealed its AirFrame datacentre solutions this week, high-density blade servers running a combination of OpenStack and VMware software and designed to support Nokia’s virtualised network services for telcos.

“We are taking on the IT-telco convergence with a new solution to challenge the traditional IT approach of the datacentre,” said Marc Rouanne, executive vice president, Mobile Broadband at Nokia Networks.

“This newest solution brings telcos carrier-grade high availability, security-focused reliability as well as low latency, while leveraging the company’s deep networks expertise and strong business with operators to address an increasingly cloud-focused market valued in the tens of billions of euros.”

The servers, which come pre-integrated with Nokia’s own switches, are based on Intel’s x86 chips and run OpenStack as well as VMware, and can be managed using Nokia’s purpose-built cloud management solution. The platforms are ETSI NFV / OPNFV-certified, so they can run Nokia’s own VNFs as well as those developed by certified third parties.

The company’s orchestration software can also manage the split between both virtualised and network legacy functions in either centralised or distributed network architectures.

Phil Twist, vice president of Portfolio Marketing at Nokia Networks told BCN the company designed the servers specifically for the telco world, adding things like iNICs and accelerators to handle the security, encryption, virtual routing, digital signal processing (acceleration for radio) that otherwise would tie up processor capacity in a telco network.

But he also said the servers could be leveraged for standing up its own cloud services, or for the wider scale-out market.

“Our immediate ambition is clear: to offer a better alternative for the build-out of telco clouds optimized for that world.  But of course operators have other in-house IT requirements which could be hosted on this same cloud, and indeed they could then offer cloud services to their enterprise customers on this same cloud,” he explained.

“We could potentially build our own cloud to host SaaS propositions to our customers, or in theory potentially offer the servers for enterprise applications but that’s not our initial focus,” he added.

Though Twist didn’t confirm whether this was indeed Nokia’s first big move towards the broader IT infrastructure market outside networking, the announcement does mean the company will be brought into much closer competition with both familiar (Ericsson, Cisco) and less familiar (HP) incumbents offering their own OpenStack-integrated cloud kit.

Cloud & IT Management, Information technology management, Logicalis, Mobile device, Networking, Virtualization

Updating Your Network Infrastructure for Modern Devices

Today the world of IT infrastructures is changing. This is due to the way companies communicate and the way they send and receive data within their networks, and the development of cloud computing and virtualised servers has re-shaped the way we share information with one another.

Cloud computing is a scalable and reliable cloud based environment which utilises remote servers to host and store all of our information. Just some of the benefits of cloud computing include improved accessibility, reduced spending on maintaining localised servers, a streamlining of processes and much more flexibility for businesses and organisations. (To find out more about how cloud computing works and how it can benefit your business, visit PC Mag online.)

Networking and Secure Infrastructures

With the increased accessibility of using servers in the cloud, it’s never been more important for network security. A greater number of people and an increasing number of new devices, including mobile devices will request access to modern day business networks. From laptops and contemporary tablet devices, Blackberries and smart phones, to desktop computers and other digital devices, one single business will have a lot of different data handlers to consider.

With new devices, are increased levels of complexity when it comes to traffic patterns, and as expected there are more security threats when more devices request to access your network. With this in mind, today’s IT infrastructure needs to be updated in order to cope with the increasing amount of data flowing over the IT network. (For more information on networking, visit Logicalis, an international IT solutions provider.)

The Importance of Accessibility

What’s most important to understand is the importance of welcoming such changes to your IT network. Virtualisation can improve the way businesses send and receive information, both internally and externally, and can also help organisations of all sizes cut down on costs in the long-run. Cloud servers can also provided added security with data backup and the development of virtualised computing can reduce planned downtime by up to 90%.

With the growth and development of modern devices it’s now more important than ever to ensure that you have increased accessibility for all business devices. Finding the right IT solutions provider for your business can help you support next-generation technology whilst encouraging better communication between key people in your company. 

Read more on how virtualisation and cloud servers could be redefining the roles of IT within a business on the Logicalis blog. 

Featured, Network Infrastructure, Networking, PoE, wireless

What’s Your Wireless Strategy?

Video with Dan Allen, Solutions Architect

 

There are many different factors that go into wireless deployments. Before you start you need a well thought out wireless strategy. For example, IT departments need to look into whether they have specific power restrictions. Will it be cheaper to run new cabling? Do you have the right switching infrastructure to support your initiative? Is it PoE or UPoE? How will you address security concerns?

 

What’s Your Wireless Strategy?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvVpot9_1kE

 

 

Are you interested in speaking more about your wireless strategy? Email us at socialmedia@greenpages.com

 

 

 

 

 

Featured, IaaS, Miscellaneous IT, Networking, Saas, SDDC, Storage, Virtualization

The 2013 Tech Industry – A Year in Review

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

As 2013 comes to a close and we begin to look forward to what 2014 will bring, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect back on the past year.  We’ve been talking a lot about that evil word ‘cloud’ for the past 3 to 4 years, but this year put a couple of other terms up in lights including Software Defined X (Datacenter, Networking, Storage, etc.) and Big Data.  Like ‘cloud,’ these two newer terms can easily mean different things to different people, but put in simple terms, in my opinion, there are some generic definitions which apply in almost all cases.  Software Defined X is essentially the concept of taking any ties to specific vendor hardware out of the equation and providing a central point for configuration, again vendor agnostic, except of course for the vendor providing the Software Defined solution :) .  I define Big Data simply as the ability to find a very specific and small needle of data in an incredibly large haystack within a reasonably short amount of time. I see both of these technologies becoming more widely adopted in short order with Big Data technologies already well on the way. 

As for our friend ‘the cloud,’ 2013 did see a good amount of growth in consumption of cloud services, specifically in the areas of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  IT has adopted a ‘virtualization first’ strategy over the past 3 to 4 years when it comes to bringing any new workloads into the datacenter.  I anticipate we’ll begin to see a ‘SaaS first’ approach being adopted in short order if it is not out there already.  However, I can’t necessarily say the same on the IaaS side so far as ‘IaaS first’ goes.  While IaaS is a great solution for elastic computing, I still see most usage confined to the application development or super large scale out application (Netflix) type use cases.  The mass adoption of IaaS for simply forklifting existing workloads out of the private datacenter and into the public cloud simply hasn’t happened.  Why?? My opinion is for traditional applications neither the cost nor operational model make sense, yet. 

In relation to ‘cloud,’ I did see a lot of adoption of advanced automation, orchestration, and management tools and thus an uptick in ‘private clouds.’  There are some fantastic tools now available both commercially and open source, and I absolutely expect to see this adoption trend to continue, especially in the Enterprise space.  Datacenters, which have a vast amount of change occurring whether in production or test/dev, can greatly benefit from these solutions. However, this comes with a word of caution – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.  I say this because I have seen several instances where customers have wanted to automate literally everything in their environments. While that may sound good on the surface, I don’t believe it’s always the right thing to do.  There are times still where a human touch remains the best way to go. 

As always, there were some big time announcements from major players in the industry. Here are some posts we did with news and updates summaries from VMworld, VMware Partner Exchange, EMC World, Cisco Live and Citrix Synergy. Here’s an additional video from September where Lou Rossi, our VP, Technical Services, explains some new Cisco product announcements. We also hosted a webinar (which you can download here) about VMware’s Horizon Suite as well as a webinar on our own Cloud Management as a Service Offering

The past few years have seen various predictions relating to the unsustainability of Moore’s Law which states that processors will double in computing power every 18-24 months and 2013 was no exception.  The latest prediction is that by 2020 we’ll reach the 7nm mark and Moore’s Law will no longer be a logarithmic function.  The interesting part is that this prediction is not based on technical limitations but rather economic ones in that getting below that 7nm mark will be extremely expensive from a manufacturing perspective and, hey, 64k of RAM is all anyone will ever need right?  :)

Probably the biggest news of 2013 was the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) had undertaken a massive program and seemed to be capturing every packet of data coming in or out of the US across the Internet.   I won’t get into any political discussion here, but suffice it to say this is probably the largest example of ‘big data’ that exists currently.  This also has large potential ramifications for public cloud adoption as security and data integrity have been 2 of the major roadblocks to adoption so it certainly doesn’t help that customers may now be concerned about the NSA eavesdropping on everything going on within the public datacenters.  It is estimated that public cloud providers may lose as much as $22-35B over the next 3 years as a result of customers slowing adoption due to this.  The only good news in this, at least for now, is it’s very doubtful that the NSA or anyone else on the planet has the means to actual mine anywhere close to 100% of the data they are capturing.  However, like anything else, it’s probably only a matter of time.

What do you think the biggest news/advancements of 2013 were?  I would be interested in your thoughts as well.

Register for our upcoming webinar on December 19th to learn how you can free up your IT team to be working on more strategic projects (while cutting costs!).

 

 

Cloud computing, End-User Computing, Featured, hybrid, IT Management, Network Infrastructure, Networking, Storage, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

Rapid Fire Summary of Carl Eschenbach’s General Session at VMworld 2013

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

I wrote a blog on Monday summarizing the opening keynote at VMworld 2013. Checking in again quickly to summarize Tuesday’s General Session. VMware’s COO Carl Eschenbach took the stage and informed the audience that there are 22,500 people in attendance, which is a new record for VMware. This makes it the single largest IT infrastructure event of the year. 33 of these attendees have been to all 10 VMworlds, and Carl is one of them.

Carl started the session by providing a recap of Monday’s announcements around vSphere/vCloud Suite 5.5, NSX, vSAN, vCHS, Cloud Foundry, and vCHS. The overall mantra of the session revolved around IT as a Service. The following points were key:

  • Virtualization extends to ALL of IT
  • IT management gives way to automation
  • Compatible hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous
  • Foundation is SDDC

After this, came a plethora of product demos. If you would like to watch the presentation to be able to check out the demos you can watch them here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/generalsessions

vCAC Demo

  • Started with showing the service catalogue & showing options to deploy an app to a private or public cloud. Also showed costs of each option as well
    • I’m assuming this is showing integration between vCAC & ITBM, although that was not directly mentioned
    • Next they displayed the database options as part of the app – assuming this is vFabric Data Director (DB as a Service)
    • Showed the auto-scale option
    • Showed the health of the application after deployment…this appears to be integration with vCOPS (again, not mentioned)
    • The demo showed how the product provided self-service, transparent pricing, governance, and automation

NSX Demo

  • Started with a networking conversation around why there are challenges with networking being the ball and chain of the VM. After that, Carl discussed the features and functions that NSX can provide. Some key ones were:
    • Route, switch, load balance, VPN, firewall, etc.
  • Displayed the vSphere web client & looked at the automated actions that happened via vCAC and NSX  during the app provisioning
  • What was needed to deploy this demo you may ask? L2 switch, L3 router, firewall, & load balancer. All of this was automated and deployed with no human intervention
  • Carl then went through the difference in physical provisioning vs. logical provisioning with NSX & abstracting the network off the physical devices.
  • West Jet has deployed NSX, got to hear a little about their experiences
  • There was also a demo to show you how you can take an existing VMware infrastructure and convert/migrate to an NSX virtual network. In addition, it showed how vMotion can make the network switch with zero downtime

The conversation then turned to storage. They covered the following:

  • Requirements of SLAs, policies, management, etc. for mission critical apps in the storage realm
  • vSAN discussion and demo
  • Storage policy can be attached at the VM layer so it is mobile with the VM
  • Showcased adding another host to the cluster and the local storage is auto-added to the vSAN instance
  • Resiliency – can choose how many copies of the data are required

IT Operations:

  • Traditional management silos have to change
  • Workloads are going to scale to massive numbers and be spread across numerous environments (public and private)
  • Conventional approach is scripting and rules which tend to be rigid and complex –> Answer is policy based automation via vCAC
  • Showed example in vCOPS of a performance issue and drilled into the problem…then showed performance improve automatically due to automated proactive response to detected issues.  (autoscaling in this case)
  • Discussing hybrid and seamless movement of workloads to/from private/public cloud
  • Displayed vCHS plugin to the vSphere web client
  • Showed template synchronization between private on prem vSphere environment up to vCHS
  • Provisioned an app from vCAC to public cloud (vCHS)  (it shows up inside of vSphere Web client)

 

Let me know if there are questions on any of these demos.

Cisco, Featured, Network Infrastructure, Networking, Software Defined Networking, Unified Communications

Days 5 at Cisco Live – Video Recap

By Nick Phelps, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we5PRDAH_p0

Here’s the recap of the final day of Cisco Live. All in all, a great event with a ton of useful information. I got to sit in on some great sessions and get a lot of hands-on experience with a lot of cutting edge technologies. You can watch the recaps of days 1-4 here if you missed them:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3 & 4

 

 

 

 

 

Featured, Network Infrastructure, Networking, Software Defined Networking, Storage and Information Management

The Buzz Around Software Defined Networking

By Nick Phelps, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p51KAxPOrt4

 

One of the emerging trends in our industry that is stirring up some buzz right now is software defined networking. In this short video I answer the following questions about SDN:

 

  1. What is Software Defined Networking or SDN?
  2. Who has this technology deployed and how are they using it?
  3. What does SDN mean to the small to mid-market?
  4. When will the mid-market realize the benefits from SDN based offerings?
  5. When will we hear more? When should we expect the next update?

 

What are your thoughts on SDN? I’d love to hear you’re comments on the video and my take on the topic!