Category: cisco equipment

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced the agenda for Networkers at Cisco Live 2010, taking place in Barcelona, 25-28 January. Based on the theme ‘Knowledge Is Power,’ Networkers at Cisco Live 2010 will equip delegates with the technical knowledge required to stay competitive in today’s economy. For those unable to attend the event in Barcelona, an additional one-day virtual event will be held at Cisco Live on Tuesday, 26 Jan., incorporating key elements from the main agenda, such as the keynotes, technical training sessions and a virtual chat with Cisco keynoter Marthin De Beer. (Click the link for additional information and to register for the virtual event.)

Key Facts
Now in its 19th year, Networkers at Cisco Live is Cisco’s European flagship annual technology conference and exhibition.
Agenda highlights will be available virtually on Cisco Live.
Keynotes this year will be delivered by leading technology thinkers Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Business Group, and Professor Bruce Thomas, director of the Wearable Computer Laboratory at the University of South Australia.
De Beer is a technology visionary who has led the development of innovative and leading-edge technologies such as Cisco TelePresence™, Digital Media Systems, IP Video Surveillance and Smart Grid solutions, cultivating a steady stream of new businesses that take Cisco into adjacent markets.
As a leading academic on wearable computers, augmented reality and virtual reality, Thomas works to make first-person perspective applications a reality. In addition to his keynote, Thomas will be giving live demonstrations of his current projects at the World of Solutions, the primary exhibition area for Networkers at Cisco Live 2010.

Event highlights
More than 240 technical training and educational sessions for delegates
Opportunity to meet with dozens of Cisco experts through the Meet the Engineer program and at the Cisco Technical Design Clinics on a one-to-one basis
Super Sessions on Collaboration and Data Centre
Onsite Innovation Centre celebrating 25 years of Cisco technology
World of Solutions, the interactive learning area of Networkers at Cisco Live 2010 featuring more than 60 exhibitors
Opportunity to see live webcasts of keynote sessions on Cisco Live!

Supporting Quotes
“Networkers at Cisco Live remains the most important customer event in our European calendar, bringing together more than 5,000 IT networking professionals from across Europe all under one roof. Under the theme ‘Knowledge Is Power,’ Networkers at Cisco Live 2010 will equip organizations with the technical knowledge, particularly in the area of new collaboration technologies, needed to stay competitive in today’s economy,” said Amanda Jobbins, vice president, European Marketing, Cisco.
Supporting Resources

Networkers at Cisco Live official website
View the event agenda
Delegate registration for Networkers at Cisco Live
Watch a personal invitation from Amanda Jobbins
Follow Networkers 2010 on Twitter
About Networkers at Cisco Live 2010

Following many years as the IT industry’s leading educational, training and networking conference, Europe’s flagship technology event Cisco Networkers will join the Cisco Live family in 2010. Continuing to meet the complex requirements of IT and communications professionals, Networkers at Cisco Live will equip delegates and their organisations with the technical knowledge needed to stay competitive in today’s challenging economy. This must attend event takes place in the vibrant city of Barcelona and is not to be missed by anyone wanting to learn about smarter, more powerful approaches to the way we work, live, play and learn.

Cisco NetFlow is a Cisco developed flow technology that allows bandwidth monitoring of a network. NetFlow Analyzer is a software that uses Cisco NetFlow to monitor bandwidth and runs in windows and linux. Cisco routers/switching devices export NetFlow as UDP packets. Cisco NetFlow is one of the flows, among other flows, that is used to monitor bandwidth in the network. These Cisco NetFlow packets can be analyzed using NetFlow Analyzer, to monitor bandwidth, to gather information on the top talkers, applications and many other features. Network traffic analysis is one of the uses of NetFlow Analyzer. NetFlow Analyzer delivers easy-to-understand reports on in-depth traffic analysis and network bandwidth monitoring.

Cisco NetFlow allows for extremely granular and accurate bandwidth monitoring by recording network traffic into the device cache. Since network traffic has a flow nature to it, the NetFlow accounting data that is built in the cache, characterizes the IP traffic being forwarded. Various screen shots of the network traffic report that can be generated using NetFlow Analyzer have been given here.

Cisco NetFlow data records exported by routers and switches consist of expired traffic flows with detailed traffic statistics useful to monitor bandwidth and network traffic analysis. These flows contain information about source and destination IP addresses along with the protocols and ports used in the end-to-end conversation.

This exported NetFlow data is collected and analyzed by NetFlow Analyzer to generate reports on top hosts, top applications, top conversations and top talkers using the bandwidth in your network.

Cisco NetFlow combined with NetFlow Analyzer yields valuable information about the behavior of traffic and bandwidth monitoring on your network. Armed with this information, it is easier to make critical decisions on bandwidth capacity, security, and optimal usage of network infrastructure.

NetFlow traffic statistics
The latest version of NetFlow Analyzer supports Cisco Netflow version 5, version 7 & version 9 exports.

While NetFlow version 5 is the most used version supported on routers, NetFlow version 7 is an enhancement that exclusively supports NetFlow with Cisco Catalyst 5000 series switches equipped with a NetFlow feature card (NFFC). NetFlow version 7 is not compatible with Cisco routers. NetFlow version 9 is the recent addition to the series.

had the enjoyable opportunity over the last few weeks to jump in and do a basic Cisco voice install. It was about 110 phones, with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition. This is a single box that includes Call Manager 6.1.3, and Unity Connection 2.1. It had to be done fast, and it had to be done right, so I stuck to mostly tried and true configurations.

Since this was a price sensitive design, we used the 2800 router to its maximum potential. The 2800 is an amazingly flexible piece of equipment; it can be configured to do large variety of things. Sometimes known as the Integrated Services Router, or ISR, it can be set up as a router, firewall, VPN, Voice Gateway, SIP session border controller, transoder, conference bridge, and survivable remote gateway, all at the same time, on the same box!

The call manager and unity connection install was straightforward, like punching out license plates. Set up media, device pools, partitions, calling search spaces, translation patterns, gateways, route filters, route patterns, etc. Scan then batch add the phones, set up voicemail and autoattendant call handlers, create expections, deal with the special people, and that’s it. Enough said about that.

The Cisco 2800 Integrated Services Router is used in this example to terminate a Multilink PPP bundle of four Internet T1’s, act as a firewall, provide media services to the Cisco call manager, act as an MGCP controlled analog gateway, and use Cisco Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) to be the backup call processor to the main Cisco Call Manager.

SIP is ok with Network Address Translation as long as the firewall is capable of doing deep packet inspection and NAT’s all references to IP addresses. When I tried to NAT the inside interface of the firewall…it did not work so well. The remote SIP service provider was seeing private IP addresses in the SIP text, which does not make for good two way communications.

The Quality of Service setup on this example is fairly straightforward. Outbound is the standard Cisco MQS low-latency queuing setup, with a priority queue for voice and class based weighted fair queuing for the rest. Even though the service provider has said they prioritize inbound voice, I still set up inbound policing. Non-voice is limited to 4 Mbps, and anything greater than that will be dropped. Voice can use all of the bandwidth, so essentially there is 2 Mbps reserved for inbound voice. This is based on a calculation of 80 kbps for one G.711 call, so 2000 kbps gives us 25 concurrent voice calls, which should be plenty for 110 phones.

While MARS may seem similar to CW-SIMS, it is quite different. MARS actually understands the configuration and topology of your network. You can think of MARS as a “virtual security admin” for your network — working while you sleep.

MARS uses NetFlow data from Cisco routers to have a real-time understanding of network traffic. It knows what is considered normal and what is not; this is called behavioral analysis. With behavioral analysis, MARS can stop abnormal network traffic. MARS has over 150 audit compliance templates ,and will make recommendations on how to remediate threats to your network.

MARS is actually an appliance that you install on your network. This appliance comes in a variety of sizes and license levels based on the size of your network. Cisco Security MARS and Cisco Security Manager are part of the Cisco Security Management Suite.

The Cisco Works Security Information Management Solution (CW-SIMS) in the centralized repository that all Cisco devices use for security logging and other information. According to Cisco, this application “integrates, correlates, and analyzes security event data from the enterprise network to improve visibility and provide actionable intelligence for strengthening an organization’s security.”

With so many security devices in your network, one application has to try to correlate all the logs and security information that is generated. According to Cisco, here are the features that the CW-SIMS offers:

Comprehensive Correlation: Statistical, rules-based, and vulnerability correlation of events as they happen, in real time, across all integrated Cisco network devices.
Threat Visualization: See a visual status and generate reports of all the security events as they happen across your network.
Incident Resolution Management: SIMs integrates with common helpdesk packages to track security events until resolution.
Integrated Knowledge Base: SIMS can be a source of knowledge about security issues and how they are resolved.
Real-Time Notification: SIMS can notify security admins, in real time, when events occur.