#CiscoChampion

July 21, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

ACI—Some lesser known features

I am a consultant at a Cisco partner and I get to see a lot of different networks. Most of the networks are Cisco, but there are a few that are not. From time to time, I get network assessment projects. I love these types of projects as they are an exploration of  uncharted networks to see what can…

July 18, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

The other side of the jack: Is your Enterprise Network enterprise ready?

“Give me the best servers you have”, they said. “Give me the best computers you have”, they said. “Give me more mobile devices”, they said. “Give me the network required to use all these things”, they (almost) never said. The enterprise network is stil…

July 9, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

Will Software Defined Networking Actually Happen?

As a writer for the IT media, conference speaker, and co-host of the Packet Pushers podcast, I cover emerging networking technologies often. The new tech that comes across my screen ranges in value from “I can’t believe that got funded,” to “Why has no one thought of this before?” and everything in…

July 7, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

The Art of Ambassador Programs: 5 tips from a geek

All right I confess I’m not that kind of geek. I admire and work with many IT engineers, but if you need me to configure a Nexus switch you’ll be out of luck. I am a geek though, and I know about building successful B2B and B2C Ambassador Programs. Before I start sharing my 2 cents, let’s take a loo…

July 7, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

The Internet of Everything: An Opportunistic View from the Clouds

The Internet of Everything (IoE) describes machine-to-machine (M2M) compute entities that track and measure real-time data that can be used to build out a data history for analytics that could be used to optimize the quality of life. The opportunity is represented by devices used in a person’s every…

July 2, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

Technology Behind the Surface

What do Walt Disney World, The Matrix, and Big Ben have in common?  On the surface they do not share much.  Each of these is special because everything that makes them tick, pun intended, are hidden from view of the consumers.  We all intuitively know there is a great deal of complexity behind the s…

June 26, 2014

DATA CENTER

Decoding UCS Invicta – Part 2

Solid State Drives (SSD) 101 In part one of this series we covered the internals of HDDs and some basic techniques manufacturers use to increase performance. In part two we are going into a deep dive of Solid State Drives (SSD), how they work, and some caveats. Solid State Drives (SSD) The solid-sta…

June 26, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

Summary: Decoding UCS Invicta Part 2

Solid State Drives (SSD) 101 In part one of this series we covered the internals of HDDs and some basic techniques manufacturers use to increase performance. In part two we are going into a deep dive of Solid State Drives (SSD), how they work, and some caveats. The solid-state drives (SSDs) have a s…

June 25, 2014

PERSPECTIVES

Summary: Decoding UCS Invicta Part 1

Storage 101 Less than a year ago, October 29th 2013, Cisco acquired Whiptail {http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1279074}, a high performance scalable solid-state memory system. Shortly after its acquisition, the product lines were renamed UCS Invicta. The idea behind UCS Invicta and its market posit…