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Purdue’s hefty switch discounts ‘unusual,’ Cisco says

Posted on by Posted in Cisco, Tech

Company responds to blog reports showing discounts of 76% on Nexus switches for university.
The steep discounts that Purdue University recently received on Cisco’s Nexus 7000 switches are ‘unusual’ and based on factors that go beyond the purchase alone, Cisco says.

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Cisco this week responded to blog reports that it offered Purdue an exclusive deal that includes a 76% discount off Nexus 7000 switches. Purdue is shopping for switches for its Hansen Cluster project, which is a “community cluster” for Purdue faculty and staff looking to cost-effectively acquire computational resources.

Hansen consists of Dell compute nodes with four 12-core AMD Opteron 6176 processors, 96GB, 192GB, or 512GB of memory, and 250GB of local disk, with 10-Gigabit Ethernet interconnects between nodes. Cisco’s Nexus switches will provide those 10G interconnects and manage traffic via its FabricPath data center switching capability.

CUSTOMERS REACT: How is the Cisco 76% off Nexus sale going over with customers?

A discount of the size offered to Purdue is interesting in that Cisco is struggling to maintain profit margins in switching because of a product transition underway within the company from older Catalyst to newer Nexus switches, and heightened competition. Eroding profits in switching is a factor in Cisco’s current reorganization, in which it is paring workforce and product lines in an effort to regain and maintain past margins.

Cisco officials this week would not discuss the impact a 76% discount would have on switch margins or on Cisco’s effort to grow and maintain those margins. But in the company’s fourth-quarter conference call with investors, CFO Frank Calderoni said fourth quarter “discounts and pricing were flat as compared to the third quarter,” which, according to a Cisco spokesperson, indicates that the company’s overall pricing and discounting strategy has not changed.

There is some speculation in the blog posts, though, that Cisco may be inflating the list price of its switches in order to make attractive margins while still discounting up to 76%.

Without discussing Purdue specifically, Cisco says a discount like the one offered to the university is unusual and determined by many factors, including the project for which the purchase is targeted; the number of products, or volume, to be purchased; follow-on sales opportunities; and the existing relationship with Cisco. Purdue is one of about a half dozen customers on Cisco’s Global Customer Advisory Board, which provides feedback and guidance to Cisco on a regular basis.

“We evaluate every customer on a case-by-case basis,” says Ram Velaga, vice president of product management in Cisco’s Data Center Technology Group. “Projects, areas of interest, etc. There are arrangements for particular projects we are working on, and mutual investments. We don’t ever want a big deal to fall through with a valued customer.”

But the value of that customer is part of the negotiation process. While customers might demand a Purdue-sized discount from Cisco, it’s rare they’ll get it.

“It’s the standard give-and-take, the dance,” the Cisco spokesperson says. “That’s where the evaluation comes in. Other customers do not get that level of discount. It’s very unusual. We make a decision based on the value” of the account.

Facial-Recognition Tools, Facebook Photos Threaten End to Anonymity: Study

Posted on by Posted in Microsoft, Tech

LAS VEGAS — A Carnegie Mellon University researcher used Facebook photos to demonstrate how facial-recognition technology can be used to identify people as they walk down the street.

Using off-the-shelf facial-recognition software and students’ photos posted on Facebook, Alessandro Acquisiti, a CMU researcher, showed attendees at the annual Black Hat security conference how he was able to positively identify 30 percent of students walking around campus.

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Acquisti also searched dating sites for users within 50 miles of a zip code and correlated them with approximately 110,000 Facebook profiles of users who also lived in that same area. The cloud-computing cluster at CMU obtained results in 15 hours and was able to positively identify 10 percent of the users on online dating sites, according to Acquisiti. Narrowing the geographic area increased the match rate.

Acquisti also combined the results with his previous research on predicting Social Security numbers and found he could guess within four tries the correct number for 28 percent of the subjects.

“The goal here is not to generate fear, but we are very close to a point where the convergence of technologies will make it possible for online and offline data to blend seamlessly … and for strangers on the street to predict certain information about you from your picture,” Acquisti said.

As more services include facial-recognition capabilities and as developers can create applications using the technology, the privacy implications are staggering, Acquisti said. Law enforcement officials can use publicly available information and government databases to compile detailed information dossiers on everyone in the country. These applications can be used on pictures of crowds at protests and demonstrations, creating a new form of crowd control.

Someone can snap photos of people at a public event and an application can cull through publicly available information on social-networking sites to identify these strangers and their friends, and list their likes and dislikes. Or online dating sites become no longer anonymous as the technology would be able to identify people by the photos.

“Notwithstanding Americans’ resistance to a Real ID infrastructure, as consumers of social networks, we have consented to a de facto Real ID that markets and information technology, rather than government and regulation, have created,” Acquisti wrote in his report, titled “Privacy in the Age of Augmented Reality.”

Google developed this kind of technology and withheld it because it was deemed to be too dangerous to release publicly, former CEO Eric Schmidt had said.

“That genie is already out of the bottle,” Acquisti said.

Facebook has made it easier for people to tag their friends, and there is no way for users to opt out of getting tagged. Security experts have long said Facebook should allow privacy-conscious users to have a one-click option to stop tag-happy friends, instead of having to manually un-tag every instance.

Facebook also integrated facial-recognition technology into the social-networking platform to auto-suggest users to be tagged in photos. As all things privacy-related in Facebook, all users were included in the recognition database by default.

The researchers said the technologies will soon “democratize surveillance,” as sinking costs make peer-to-peer facial recognition cost effective and available to everyone.

German data-protection officials recently requested that Facebook disable its facial-recognition software and delete any previously stored data. Making facial-recognition technology opt-out runs afoul of European and German data-protection laws, John Caspar, Hamburg, Germany’s commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said in a letter to Facebook Aug. 2.

If Facebook does not comply with the request, German authorities would take action and the company could face fines of up to $425,490, or 300,000 euros, Caspar said. Germany, takes online privacy much more seriously than many other countries and its laws generally restrict photographs of people and property, except in public places, such as a sporting event, without a person’s consent.

“The legal situation is clear in my opinion,” Caspar told German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt. “If the data were to get into the wrong hands, then someone with a picture taken on a mobile phone could use biometrics to compare the pictures and make an identification,” Caspar said.

Such a system could be used by undemocratic governments to spy on the opposition or by security services around the world. “The right to anonymity is in danger,” said Caspar.

Speed Subnetting for Success in the CCENT and CCNA Exams

Posted on by Posted in Career, CCNA, CCNP, Cisco, Tech

Subnetting is an absolutely critical component for CCNA success. In this article, we are first going to review how subnetting works, ensure you master the “longhand” method and understand the mathematics behind this networking principle. Once this is done, we are going to look at some shortcuts that can be used in the exam to ensure that we can solve the many subnetting challenges quickly and accurately.

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Subnetting is an absolutely critical component for CCNA success. The skill must be demonstrated in the CCENT (ICND1) and CCNA (ICND2) exams. Should you take the composite CCNA exam option, you need to be even better and faster at subnetting in order to achieve success.

In this article, we are first going to review how subnetting works and ensure you master the “longhand” method and understand the mathematics behind this networking principle. Then we will look at some shortcuts that can be used in the exam to ensure that we can solve the many subnetting challenges quickly and accurately. I believe it is critical that students understand the how’s and why’s behind this topic. It is unacceptable, in my opinion, to master subnetting if you only know the shortcuts. We need to fully understand why we are doing something in the network, and how it truly works before we can start seeking exam shortcuts.

NOTE

This article assumes you have a basic working knowledge of IP addressing and subnet masks. Also, this article assumes you can manually convert a binary octet to decimal, and vice versa.
Why Subnetting?

Why do we even need this concept of subnetting? Well, we need to break up our networks into smaller networks all of the time. Breaking the network up allows the network to be more efficient and more secure and more easily managed.

When you look at a Class B private address like 172.16.0.0/16 (255.255.0.0), you can calculate the number of hosts that can live in this network. You take the number of bits used for host addressing (16), and you raise 2 to this power and then subtract 2. So the formula is 2^h-2 where h is the number of host bits. We need a calculator for this one because the number is so big! It turns out that 65,534 can live in this network. That’s great, that’s amazing, and…it also turns out that this is impossible! In a typical TCP/IP network of today, you are going to have big problems if you start placing 500 or more systems in the same network (subnet), never mind 65,000 or more!
Number of Subnets and Number of Hosts

So if we want to use the 172.16.0.0 private address space, we need to “subnetwork” this address space in order create more network addresses that can each accommodate an appropriate number of host systems. When we subnetwork, we play a balancing act. As we “borrow” bits for subnetting from the host bits, we can create more subnets, but we do so at the cost of being able to support fewer and fewer host systems per network. The formula for how many hosts you can have always remains the same— it is 2^h-2. The formula for how many networks we can create is very similar. It is 2^n where n is the number of bits we borrow from the host bits.

Let us study an example. If we have 172.16.0.0/16 and we decide to borrow 8 bits for subnetting, we can create 2^8 or 256 different subnetworks. How many hosts can each of these subnetworks accommodate? Well, there are now 8 bits left for host addressing. 2^8-2 gives us 254 hosts per subnetwork.
A Sample Subnetting Scenario

Let us stick with the example where we begin with the private IP address space of a Class B address of 172.16.0.0. We examine our networking needs and realize that we need to accommodate 100 different subnetworks in our organization. From the previous information in this article, we know that in order to create 100 subnets, we need to borrow 7 bits (2^7 = 128). This is perfect; we have the number of subnetworks that we need, plus a few extra that we can call upon when the network inevitably grows.

What will the subnet mask be in this scenario? This mask will be the one that is used by all of the hosts in all of the different subnetworks. It is critical that we calculate this number correctly, of course.

Notice that our Class B address originally had 16 bits that made up the network ID portion. In this sample scenario we are going to borrow 7 bits. Now we have a network ID that is made up of 23 (16+7). We can write out the 23 bits of the subnet mask now:

11111111.11111111.11111110.00000000

So converting to our convenient dotted decimal notation, we can see our mask:

255.255.254.0

A cooler way to write the mask is just /23 after the IP address. This is called prefix notation.

So what would the first subnetwork network ID be? Well, we know it will start 172.16, but what will the value be in that third octet where we have some bits (7) representing the subnet and one bit representing the host portion.

To answer this in the longhand method, we write out the mask and the address from that octet in binary and do some analysis.

Mask: 11111110

IP: 00000000

Notice the first subnetwork will be 172.16.0.0. We can use all zeros in the first 7 bit positions of the third octet, and we have a zero in the last bit position which is used to identify hosts.

What would the first host address be in this network? Let’s write those last two octets out longhand:

00000000.00000001

The first host address on the 172.16.0.0 network would be:

172.16.0.1

What would the broadcast address be for that network? To get this you fill all the host bits with a 1:

00000001.111111111

172.16.1.255

How about the last usable host address on this subnetwork? Easy. We will turn all the host bits to 1, except for the last one.

00000001.11111110

172.16.1.254

What is the next subnetwork in this scheme? Well, let us turn one of those subnetwork bits on. We will start with the least significant (rightmost):

Mask: 11111110

IP: 00000010

Ahh, so the next network is 172.16.2.0/23.
Exam Shortcuts

It is wonderful to see how all of this works longhand, but in the lab exam environment, we are VERY pressed for time. We need powerful shortcuts. Here we will walk through my preferred shortcuts against the backdrop of sample exam questions.

NOTE

There are many different shortcut approaches that are all valid. This is the one that I prefer, but you might be taught another by some other Cisco trainer. Go with whatever works for you in the exam!
Sample Question 1:

What is the last usable address in the subnet of a host with the address 192.168.1.136 and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.240?

Step 1 Upon arriving at my first subnetting question in the exam environment, I build a Powers of Two reference chart on the scratch paper Cisco provides.

2^7=128 | 2^6=64 | 2^5=32 | 2^4=16 | 2^3=8 | 2^2-=4 | 2 ^1=2 | 2^0=1

Step 2 How many bits of subnetting are used in the fourth octet here? My Powers of Two chart tells me. 1 bit = 128; 2 bits = 192; 3 bits = 224; 4 bits = 240. Yes, the forth octet of the subnet mask looks like this in binary—11110000.

Step 3 Now the magic of the shortcut—we go four bits deep (from left to right) in the Powers of Two chart. This tells us the value that the subnets increment on. In our example it is 16:

So our subnets are:
o 192.168.1.0
o 192.168.1.16
o 192.168.1.32
o 192.168.1.48
o 192.168.1.64
o 192.168.1.80
o 192.168.1.96
o 192.168.1.112
o 192.168.1.128
o 192.168.1.144

Step 4 This host, with the address of 192.168.1.136 must live on the 192.168.1.128 subnet. The broadcast address for this subnet is one less than the next subnet of 144, so that is 143. The last usable address is 142. We have arrived at our answer—192.168.1.142.

Sample Question 2

Your IT Junior Administrator has provided you with the address and mask of 192.168.20.102 and 255.255.255.224. You Junior Admin has asked you to tell him how many hosts can be created on your subnet?

Step 1 Here I begin by referencing the Powers of Two chart I created on my scratch paper. Adding 128 + 64 + 32, I get the 224 value used in the fourth octet of the subnet mask. Therefore, I can see that there are 3 bits used for subnetting in that octet. This leaves 5 bits for host addressing.

2^7=128 | 2^6=64 | 2^5=32 | 2^4=16 | 2^3=8 | 2^2-=4 | 2 ^1=2 | 2^0=1

Step 2 As we discussed earlier, the equation for the number of hosts per subnet is 2^h – 2 where h is the number of host bits. From the chart I see that 2^5 = 32. 32-2 = 30 hosts per subnet.

Conclusion

Initially, the subnetting related questions strike fear in the hearts of CCNA candidates. Sure enough, with study and practice, and the many shortcut methods that exist, these questions become the favorites in the Certification Exam environment. They can be solved easily and quickly, and candidates know they solved them correctly. Thanks to the power of mathematics, there are certainly no “grey” areas in questions like these.

Cisco rival Juniper lands Microsoft’s Muglia

Posted on by Posted in Cisco, Microsoft, Tech

Former Windows Server chief to guide Juniper’s software strategy

It was a cleaner software foundation that attracted former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia to Cisco rival Juniper Networks. That, and the fact that he was familiar with many executives at Juniper from his days at Microsoft.

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Juniper this week announced that Muglia will be joining the company as executive vice president of its Software Solutions Division. In this newly created position, Muglia will oversee the company’s end-to-end software strategy and lead the newly formed Software Solutions Division.

He will report directly to Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson, another former Microsoft executive whom he worked under at Microsoft for 18 months.

A 23-year veteran of Microsoft, Muglia most recently served as president of Microsoft’s $15 billion Server and Tools Business, where he was responsible for infrastructure software, developer tools and cloud platforms, including products such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center and the Windows Azure Platform.

He was ousted by CEO Stever Ballmer and replaced with Microsoft online services veteran, Satya Nadella. Instead of accepting a new role at Microsoft, Muglia agreed to leave the company this summer.

Muglia also held leadership positions across Microsoft’s Developer, Office, Mobile Devices, Windows NT and Online Services business groups.

Juniper is centralizing its software business to further position it as a company differentiator and growth engine. Included in it will be software for Juniper’s SRX Series and vGW Series security platforms, MobileNext packet core offering for mobile operators, Junos Pulse mobile security suite for managing devices, and the Junos Space platform for developing and deploying network applications.

Software will be a key enabler of mobile device support, cloud computing and application intelligence in the networking industry going forward, Muglia says.

“The emergence of cloud, heterogeneous devices connecting, and applications (executing) in a much more automated state creates an opportunity to bring software into the network and connect to all devices,” he says. “Networks are configured and managed by manual processes, people with mice and keyboards, and separate from the application infrastructure. There is no way to deal with the scale of the amount of configuration changes in the network to ensure the reliability and consistency of the environment. Networks will be applications driven; applications are at the center of intelligence and business value. The infrastructure as a whole is being driven by the applications. Juniper is very well positioned to take this on with QFabric for cloud, and a single operating system platform. There’s not a lot of legacy mess to clean up.”

“We are excited to have a leader of Bob’s caliber coming on board to lead Juniper’s software initiatives, and I’m confident that his vision, management savvy and technical expertise will bring tremendous value to our organization,” CEO Johnson said, in a statement.

Muglia said he talked to several companies, and venture capital and equity firms, large and small, including Cisco, before deciding to go to Juniper.

“I did talk to Cisco, they’re bunch of great guys there,” he said.

Google: Sun offered to license Java for $100M

Posted on by Posted in Google, Java

IDG News Service – Sun Microsystems offered to license its Java technology to Google for $100 million, a Google attorney said Thursday, attempting to show that Oracle is out of touch as it seeks billions from Google for patent infringement.

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Oracle and Google were in court Thursday for a hearing in Oracle’s lawsuit accusing Google of patent infringement in its Android OS. Judge William Alsup was in a feisty mood, warning Oracle that “this court is not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation” and telling Google that Andy Rubin, who runs its Android business, will be “on the hot-seat” at trial.

Alsup also made it clear that he thinks Google’s ad revenues are linked to the value of Android – something Google contests — and that it will have to pay damages “probably in the millions … maybe the billions” if it’s found guilty of infringement.

Oracle sued Google last August, saying its Android OS violates seven Java-related patents, as well as Java copyrights, that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems.

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The hearing at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco was to hear Google’s motion to have Oracle’s damages expert excluded from the case. Robert Van Nest, an attorney for Google, told Alsup the expert failed to link Oracle’s patents directly to his damages estimate, which Google says is between $1.4 billion and $6.1 billion.

The expert ignored that Sun offered Google a three-year, “all-in” royalty license for Java for $100 million, which Google rejected, Van Nest said. The offer was made when Google was just starting Android’s development.

But if Google tried to negotiate a license for Java, Alsup asked, doesn’t that show Google knew it was going to infringe Sun’s patents all along?

“Tell me why there’s not wilful infringement here?” he asked.

“The negotiation that took place was not a pure licensing negotiation,” Van Nest replied. Google was trying to partner with Sun to co-develop Android, he said. When the talks failed, Google developed a “clean room” version of Java using technology it developed in-house or licensed from the Apache Software Foundation.

So why did Google think it needed a license? Alsup wanted to know.

“They were negotiating an agreement,” Van Nest said. “They weren’t saying we need a license to your technology. They came to Sun saying we have a product we’d like to build together. You guys have technology that might be useful, we have technology that might be useful, let’s partner and build it.”

If Alsup was tough on Van Nest, he was tougher on Oracle. He didn’t say Thursday if he’ll exclude Oracle’s damages expert, but he clearly thinks the upper end of his damages estimate is too high.

Still Awesome After All These Years: 8 Excellent Free Downloads

Posted on by Posted in Cisco, Microsoft, Tech

Wine gets better with age. Men get more distinguished looking (or so my wife tells me). Even some cars seem to improve as time passes (I’m looking at you, 1965 Mustang). But there’s nothing glamorous about old software apps, which just get less and less useful the older they get–right?

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WinPatrol

Another longtime security champ, WinPatrol from BillP Studios, tackles the other side of online safety: It monitors your system for unauthorized changes– the kinds made by malware and browser hijackers–and then lets you delete any offenders. It can also disable or delay startup programs so that your system boots faster. For users who want to know more about the programs running on their PC (including hidden and cryptic ones), WinPatrol Plus ($30) includes a database of tens of thousands of them. Amazingly, this program is now on version 20.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition

Alas, WinPatrol can’t defend your PC against viruses and the like. For that you need something like AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, one of the most robust free security tools ever. (In a recent test, it detected 98.5 percent of known malware.) And this is no mere scanner; AVG offers real-time protection against malware infections, plus a LinkScanner component that thwarts Web attacks while you surf. Why pay for antivirus software when this ever-improving gem does the job gratis?

IrfanView

Irfan Skiljan’s IrfanView has long been my go-to tool for cropping, resizing, and otherwise manipulating images. It’s not an editor so much as a tweaker, enabling you to make simple changes to a screenshot or photo, and to add a few special effects when the occasion warrants. IrfanView loads within a second after you click its icon, and it occupies just 1.5MB of space on your hard drive. The program hasn’t seen many major changes in recent years, but that’s a good thing.

GNU Image Manipulation Program

Of course, IrfanView doesn’t support Photoshop-level image editing. For that, turn to the GNU Image Manipulation Program, affectionately known as GIMP. It replicates many of Photoshop’s best features, offering filters, special effects, masks, layers, and everything else you need to create digital works of art (or works of digital art).

Cisco Injects New Life Into Catalyst 6500 Switch

Posted on by Posted in Career, CCIE, CCNA, CCNP, Cisco, Tech

Cisco Tuesday took dead aim at HP and its own shrinking profit margins by introducing a major refresh to its venerable Catalyst 6500 Ethernet switching platform.


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The company announced at Cisco Live in Las Vegas the Supervisor 2T engine for the 10-year-old Catalyst 6500, which delivers 2 Terabits of bandwidth to the system. This is almost three times the scale of the previous Supervisor 720, and like with that offering, 2T bandwidth can be doubled when configured into what Cisco calls a Virtual Switching System.

Cisco also announced a new generation of 10G line cards for the Sup 2T and didn’t mince words when describing the system’s purpose: to marginalize competitive offerings from Brocade, Juniper and most significantly HP, which has been gaining share on Cisco of late with lower cost platforms.

NINE LIVES: Catalyst 6500 has another decade or more left, Cisco hints

“We reject ‘good enough’ networks” which are marketed mostly on low price and drive commoditization, says John MCool, senior vice president and general management of Cisco’s Core Technology Group.  “Our market share has hovered around 70%, or 50% of intelligent ports. We’ve been able to maintain share, and grow our core share, by delivering value to our customers.”

At $38,000, the Sup 2T is priced at one-third that of HP’s A9508 switch yet is 3X the performance and supports 200+ features or services, claims Scott Gainey, Cisco director of marketing for Unified Access Solutions. Cisco says it also almost doubles the amount HP spends on R&D — $5.3 billion vs. $3 billion — even though Cisco is half HP’s size in terms of revenue.

HP, citing data from Dell’Oro Group, says it captured 12% of total worldwide Ethernet switching revenue market share in Q1, up 2.5 percentage points year-over- year.  Cisco’s share fell 5.8 points in the same period, HP claims.

But Cisco is also facing a troublesome switching product transition in which the high margin Catalyst 6500 is being squeezed by the lower margin, higher performing Nexus 7000 line. This is lowering switching profits for Cisco, which doesn’t sit well with the company or Wall Street.

So the introduction of the Sup 2T may be a way for Cisco to maintain Catalyst margins in the face of the Nexus transition; or it may indicate that a large swath of the Catalyst 6500 base, especially in the enterprise campus, is resisting the migration to the Nexus.

McCool, however, says it’s simply a case where the market is “bifurcating” into separate requirements for the enterprise campus vs. the data center.

Cisco will be leaner, faster, more attentive, Chambers pledges

Posted on by Posted in Career, CCNA, CCNP, Cisco, Tech

Discusses streamlining during keynote but dodges huge layoff expected

LAS VEGAS — Cisco CEO John Chambers briefly addressed the company’s current challenges, restructuring and imminent layoffs during his keynote address at this week’s Cisco Live customer conference.

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Cisco may shed 5,000 and perhaps up to 10,000 positions early in its fiscal year 2012, which begins in August. The company is looking to cut $1 billion in expenses and dump unproductive or non-core product operations after consecutive quarters of uninspiring performance.

Cisco has lost share and profits in switching, and its foray into consumer electronics has been disappointing. Many blame ambitious incursions into adjacent markets through 145 acquisitions over two decades, which distracted the company from its core routing and switching business, as well as a bloated management structure that stalled decision making.

Chambers promised the audience changes.

“We are continuing to reinvent ourselves,” he said during his address. “We are looking at how to streamline to move a bit faster in the future. We were too complex (in innovation). We are making changes to move at a faster pace.”

The changes will help Cisco innovate faster, Chambers said. That means new products should get into the hands of customers faster. He also promised a Cisco that’s easier to do business with and more attentive to customers.

Cisco has come under fire recently for being heavy handed in customer relations.

“You ask, we deliver,” Chambers told the customer-heavy audience of 15,000. “We’ve got to be easier to do business with, include you in driving our product direction, share our roadmaps, have an easy to use product portfolio. But innovation is the buzzword on where we’re going to go.”

In the past six months, Cisco announced 85 new products. But it also streamlined its operations and re-focused the company on five core areas of product development: Routing, Switching, Security and Services; Video; Collaboration; Data Center/Virtualization/Cloud; and Architectures.

Routing and switching is the bedrock of the company but, why these five?

“Collaboration will be the driver of productivity,” Chambers said. “Data center/virtualization/cloud is the most network-centric architecture. Architectures are the way you tie products together. And video is the next voice.”

Chambers said there are 20 million meetings per month hosted on Cisco’s WebEx application, and that the company is “putting video into everything we do architecturally.”

Cisco adds tools to scale wide-area video

Posted on by Posted in Cisco, Tech

The ECDS platform is designed to make live and on-demand enterprise video more efficient

Cisco Systems continued to build its enterprise video infrastructure on Thursday with the ECDS (Enterprise Content Delivery System), a software-hardware platform to ease video management and make distribution of video to remote locations more efficient.


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ECDS is part of Cisco’s overall Medianet architecture, designed to automate many aspects of producing and delivering video for employees, partners and customers. The company has been fleshing out this vision since 2006 with an eye to supporting new work styles and the growing network demands that come with them.

BACKGROUND: Cisco fleshes out its business video plan

The purpose of ECDS is to help enterprises distribute both live and on-demand video to large numbers of sites and users. It can be used to support dozens or thousands of users, in thousands of locations, according to Cisco. For example, the system can send live video to a branch office in one stream and then split it at that location into a single stream for each of 10 users there. This removes the need to send 10 streams across an expensive WAN (wide-area network) link, Cisco said.

ECDS consists of software that can be run on one of two new appliances, the Media Delivery Engine 3100 and 1100, or on a virtual blade on a Cisco WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) platform. The MDE 3100 can scale up to 5,000 concurrent users, the MDE 1100 to 500 users, and the MDE 50WVB to 200 users.

Part of the purpose of ECDS is to minimize the impact of video on an enterprise’s network, to tamp down the cost of expanding video use across an organization. It incorporates Cisco’s WAAS application acceleration software and provides caching capability. For example, companies can distribute pre-recorded video during off-peak hours if it doesn’t have to be viewed immediately, Cisco said. ECDS can also provide on-demand caching, which sets aside a local copy of a video the first time it’s viewed at a location, to prevent it having to be downloaded over the WAN on subsequent viewings.

In addition to handling many different video applications from Cisco and other companies, the platform works with multiple formats, including H.264, Flash and Windows Media. It also can be used in distributing video to third-party clients, including tablets and mobile devices.

Many enterprises have several forms of video on disparate systems that they want to consolidate, according to Forrester Research analyst Henry Dewing. For example, they may have an archive of training videos, a videoconferencing system for executives and another set of video offerings for customers. Those may all run on separate systems from different vendors, he said. Cisco’s enterprise video portfolio, the broadest of any vendor, appeals to some of those organizations, Dewing said.

What Cisco still doesn’t have is sophisticated video editing capability and an easy-to-use management interface, Dewing said. Editing capability integrated into the network was part of Cisco’s original vision for Medianet, but what it has provided so far is fairly simple, he said. Given the narrowing of Cisco’s focus to core products, which has already led to the demise of the Flip camcorder, the company may step back from trying to compete in a field already full of editing tools, Dewing said. User interfaces are a longtime issue for Cisco, he added. “They’re getting there, but they’re still no Apple,” Dewing said.

Facebook fires back at Google+ challenge

Posted on by Posted in Google, Tech

Facebook responds to Google’s Hangouts with Skype-fueled video calls

A little more than a week after Google unveiled its own social network , Facebook responded today with upgrades to its site, in an attempt to curb growing enthusiasm for the Google+ project.


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After teasing last week that today’s announcement was going to be ” awesome ,” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg took the wraps off a partnership with Skype that brings video chat to the social network. The news also came with the unveiling of a new group chat feature for the site.

The announcement seem to take a swing directly at Google+ , which opened with a “Hangouts” feature that is similar to an online group conference call. Facebook’s response to that is to work with Skype for its own group call feature.

That, say industry analysts, is a sign that Google+ may be sufficiently compelling to have Facebook glancing a bit nervously over its shoulder.

“The Skype deal isn’t something they cobbled together in a week, but Google’s announcement might have accelerated this a bit,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Gartner. “I don’t think this takes the wind out of the sails of Google+. They’re kind of different experiences.”

Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said Facebook just might have succeeded in taking some of the luster off Google+.

“This is Facebook both responding to Google’s announcement and pointing out to the market that Facebook has at least a 749-million user lead over Google+,” Olds said. “And Facebook also is signaling that they aren’t going to stand still and watch Google+ come on. So, yah, they are taking away some of Google’s momentum.”

While Google and Facebook have been competitors over the past year, Google’s introduction of its own social network raises the stakes to a new level.

And that is where Microsoft comes into the mix.

Microsoft and Facebook have been partners for several years, and Microsoft bought an early stake in the social network in 2007. That was a fortuitous move, which has made Microsoft and its partner Facebook common enemies of Google. They can work together to battle Google, and the Facebook/Skype deal is proof of it.

In May, Microsoft agreed to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion. While the deal hasn’t closed, upon news of the upcoming buy, there was immediate speculation that Facebook would benefit from it.

“We are going to see Facebook work with partners to try to circle the wagons against Google,” said Gartenberg. “It does become a little of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Could Microsoft and Facebook find themselves in competition down the road? Sure. But right now they have a common enemy in the guise of Google.”

But despite Facebook’s partnership with Skype and Microsoft, Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, said today’s announcement does make it look like Facebook is chasing Google.

“Facebook may have started down this path first, but Google made theirs public first, so it makes it look like Facebook is catching up,” Enderle said. “Still, both Facebook and Skype have a massive lead in their respective markets and that could render Google+ redundant regardless of how good it is. Facebook and Skype have a massive advantage with respect to customer reach against the very new and unique Google + offering.”