Tag: cisco

Cisco pledges $500m to East London Tech City

A newly formed initiative called the British Innovation Gateway (BIG) will funnel a tranche of the “long-term” $500m (£313m) investment of money, technology and manpower into areas in east London, the networking company and prime minister David Cameron jointly announced on Monday.

“I welcome this major statement of support from Cisco,” Cameron said in a statement. “East London [is] set to become a leading Tech City.”

The announcement sees Cisco follow up on commitments made in November to add resources to the East London Tech City project. The scheme will see a range of international technology companies — including Google, Facebook, Vodafone and Intel — make investments in the area around the Olympic Park and Shoreditch, which is home to many tech start-ups.

In addition, some funding will go towards building networks to link innovation hubs across the UK and create a prize, part of Cisco’s I-Prize innovation contest, to reward small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with creative business ideas. The winners will receive mentoring, training and access to in-house resources from Cisco.

“The direct expenditures associated with the BIG initiative will be spent on a mix of technology and ICT infrastructure services, human resources applied to SME mentoring and incubation, I-Prize funding and establishment and operation of physical facilities in east London,” said Phil Smith, Cisco’s chief executive for the UK and Ireland.

The British Innovation Gateway will be the start of a five-year project to foster the growth of high-tech small businesses, according to the Santa Clara-based networking specialist.

“Cisco anticipates that the rest of the investment goal it will make related to BIG will be in innovative UK [small and medium-sized enterprises] emerging as a result of BIG. This investment must remain unspecified for obvious reasons,” Smith said.

As part of the initiative, Cisco will create two linked ‘innovation centres’ in Shoreditch and the Olympic Park. The centres will use networked collaboration technology to connect with other centres across the UK and the globe. In addition, Cisco plans to build networks to hook into other clusters in east London, such as the Digital Peninsula in Greenwich.

Elizabeth Varley, chief executive of Techhub, a hub for start-up companies in the east end of London, believes that the investment in the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ area around Old Street and Shoreditch is a savvy move for the US networking giant.

“I can see the value to big companies like Cisco in terms of tapping in,” Varley said. “If you’re not immersed in that culture and community, it can be difficult to establish something like it.”

Cisco bolsters routers to spur IPv6 migration

Cisco this week enhanced its range of IPv6 for carrier core and edge routers in an effort to facilitate the eventual migration of IPv4.

The Carrier-Grade IP version 6 line of solutions includes a new hardware module for Cisco CRS-1 router, and software for that system, as well as the border router ASR 9000. Cisco also announced professional service offerings to help customers transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

Internet Evolution

Cisco says there are 700 days left until the last block of IPv4 addresses are assigned. For 2015, 15 billion Internet IP terminals. IPv6 enhancements deployed this week are intended to provide a bridge from IPv4 to IPv6 for the entire network, while at the same time preserving the existing IPv4 addresses to facilitate migration.

IPv4 has a finite set of unique addresses, which total about $ 4 million, which are being rapidly depleted due to the growth of Internet-connected devices and smart devices. IPv6 addresses are 340 unique undecillion – or more than 50 billion billion billion – for every person on earth, more than enough to continue to support the demand for IP addresses, Cisco says.

However, IPv4 and IPv6 protocols are not directly compatible, so a network migration from IPv4 to IPv6 requires preservation of IPv4, while orchestrating a smooth transition to IPv6 and prudent.

This has been the main reason why the industry has been putting this migration even though IPv6 was developed a decade ago. But with the IPv4 address depletion is facing imminent, the time may have come to accelerate the adoption of IPv6.

“I think we’ve reached the point where we should be concerned about it,” says Glen Hunt, an analyst at Current Analysis. “The problem biggets could be that we have been crying wolf about IPv6 and defining ways to move to attack the problem. It’s probably something to take seriously two to five years from now, but (the companies) have to start prepare. ”

With that, Cisco announced the Carrier-Grade engine service for the CRS-1. deep in the core network service provider implemented, this module supports large-scale, network address translation, high performance (NAT).

At the edge, Cisco launched IPv6 Carrier-Grade Solution for its ASR Series routers. This is software that helps activate NAT on the edge of a network of small and distributed IP networks.

The software is aimed at first tunnel IPv6 over IPv4, then the inverse function of IPv6 addresses to IPv4 outnumbered.

Finally, Cisco offers services to implement IPv6 Carrier-Grade solution. This is professional services designed to make the transition to IPv6 smoothly and reduce the risk for network operations. Services include initial planning and IPv6 readiness assessment for the design and implementation.

All products will be available in early 2010. Cisco did not disclose pricing.

Cisco unveils new generation of branch routers

The ISR G2 is designed to address increasingly distributed and collaborative workforces, and is the cornerstone of a new Cisco architecture called Borderless Network. Borderless Network is a five-phase plan to deliver services and applications to anyone anywhere, regardless of device or network technology.

Borderless Network is intended to support applications, processing cycles and services that are increasingly distributed and virtualized, such as those in cloud computing and software-as-a-service environments. Some analysts say it is more than another Cisco “marketecture,” though.

“Application and device borders are eroding,” says Rob Whiteley of Forrester Research. “This is not like SONA (Cisco’s Services Oriented Network Architecture) where it was very hard to point to things to implement. SONA was more of a marketecture, more of a religion that you adopted. It was trying to convince you of value, whereas (Borderless Networks) has value.”

Cisco introduced the first-generation ISR in 2004 and has sold more than 7 million units since then, an installed base of $10 billion, company officials say. Some analysts say its popularity is unmatched.

“The ISR line is perhaps the best-selling network product line of all time,” says Zeus Kerrvala of The Yankee Group. “They’ve done a great job of keeping the ISR features set way ahead of any competitor, which is the reason they have north of 90% share. There’s no product set that Cisco has put more focus on and it remains the cornerstone of their enterprise penetration strategy.”

According to Dell’Oro Group, Cisco owned an 84% revenue share of the $709 million access router market in the second quarter of 2009.

With the economy turning around and video expected to boom as a percentage of network traffic, that share may increase. ISR G2 routers — the 1900, 2900 and 3900 series — include new video digital signal processors key to delivering what Cisco calls “medianet” capabilities for TelePresence, surveillance, collaboration and digital signage.

Other medinet-enabled enhancements of ISR G2 include a video-ready media engine, scalable audio-conferencing, up to 1Terabyte of video storage per module, a multigigabit switching fabric for high performance, and WAN optimization and application acceleration.

But the ISR really owes its success to service enablement — Cisco says there are hundreds of services available for the first generation. On that front, Cisco introduced a number of enhancements including a software license to turn up new services on the router rather than going through a hardware upgrade.

The ISR G2’s service-ready engine lets users dynamically deploy remote, virtualized services in branches without on-site support or network downtime. The ISR G2 services module includes up to 1 Terabyte of on-board storage for these virtualized services.

Cisco routers get an upgrade

Cisco Systems submitted on Tuesday faster, more feature rich versions of their routers to access hot-selling in an attempt to fend off competition from rivals Juniper Networks and 3Com.

new 1800, 2800 and 3800 Cisco wide area network access routers feature embedded security measures and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), a method for making telephone calls over the unregulated Internet, rather than telephone network heavily regulated and taxed traditional, “said Mike Volpi, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s routing technology group.

“These devices only when necessary to direct traffic, but that does not do it again,” said Volpi. “We must do more.”

This equipment is typically used by small to medium businesses or large companies with branches. The routers sit at the customer’s network and facilitate access to Internet and other wide area services. Most of these devices are sold by companies, which offer their customers as part of their data networks and Internet services.

Cisco dominates the U.S. $ 4 billion a year market for such equipment, claiming a 90 percent market share. But in the last six months, Cisco rival Juniper Networks and 3Com have made efforts to attack Cisco’s dominant position, according to Joel Conover, principal analyst at Current Analysis.

“The Cisco platforms today are old,” said Conover. “He now faces a new threat, competition, and – conveniently -. It has been working on a new platform for two years”

The 1800 costs U.S. $ 1,395, the 2800 is U.S. $ 1,995 and are available this month. The 3800, around U.S. $ 9500, Start selling in October.

Cisco and BMC join forces for cloud computing

Cisco and BMC Software have teamed up to support large-scale cloud computing multi-tenant infrastructure. Under the alliance, both companies said they will align product development plans and technology architectures. This, he said, will offer customers worldwide a set of products that claim will simplify and automate the delivery of services in the cloud.

Based on existing joint solutions, Cisco also resell BMC Software Assurance services and compliance solutions as an option in the Cisco Unified Computing System.

As part of the alliance, Cisco and BMC has introduced the Integrated Delivery Platform Cloud. The couple says they have been designed to meet the needs of service providers and large-scale private media of cloud computing.

Bob Beauchamp, president and CEO of BMC Software, said: “As cloud computing takes place from a strategic idea to business reality, companies are quickly discovering the complexity of deploying and managing cloud solutions in a hybrid data center.”

Padmasree Warrior, CTO, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise, Trade and Small Business, Cisco said. “Cisco and BMC has a common vision for the advancement of cloud computing with a unified infrastructure management combined with a Seamless Cloud Integrated Delivery Platform allows our customers implement end-to-end IT services that run in a cloud infrastructure spanning networks, systems, storage and applications. “