Manually installing and configuring application components across multiple cloud destinations is repetitive. Manually installing and configuring application components across multiple cloud destinations is repetitive. Try using VMware vFabric Application Director to Model an application once and then deploy it across multiple public or private clouds.

New management product provides superior automation, orchestration, and control of enterprise-class application services in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments

F5 Networks, Inc. has announced BIG-IQ Cloud, a new software-based management solution that enables customers to deploy application delivery and network services in a consistent, fast, and repeatable manner across public and private clouds, traditional data centers, and hybrid environments. With an extensible, modular architecture, BIG-IQ offers an intelligent framework that centralizes management of the application control plane to provide intuitive, flexible, and scalable management capabilities for the F5 BIG-IP product family. This solution is a key milestone in supporting F5’s goals of delivering application-layer SDN services and bringing superior application intelligence and programmability to software defined data centers.  

“Organizations are pursuing a wide variety of on-premises and off-premises cloud solutions to bolster efficiency and reduce costs,” said Jason Needham, VP of Product Management and Marketing at F5. “With BIG-IQ Cloud, F5 customers can seamlessly configure and automate application delivery services—such as availability and optimization—in cloud and hybrid infrastructures. In line with our vision for application-layer SDN, BIG-IQ Cloud offers customers an effective way to dynamically scale services, infrastructure, and application resources in concert.”

Details

Today’s organizations are looking to move their applications to the cloud as a means to increase infrastructure agility and reduce costs. However, many enterprises have found that dedicated orchestration and management tools are needed to fully realize the benefits of this transition while maintaining visibility across their systems.

BIG-IQ Cloud represents a unique approach in addressing these challenges as organizations integrate their application architectures with emerging cloud solutions. By leveraging the rich application intelligence and visibility inherent in F5’s market-leading BIG-IP solutions, BIG-IQ Cloud extends valuable services and control capabilities to the management plane.

Key capabilities of BIG-IQ Cloud include: 

• Orchestrated application delivery and network services – With BIG-IQ Cloud, services can be federated across cloud systems to simplify management. For example, BIG-IQ Cloud can be integrated with VMware network virtualization to simplify the process of provisioning application delivery and network services as part of a VMware workflow. The solution’s REST API enables users to integrate F5 technologies with existing management and cloud orchestration tools to create customized solutions for enhanced infrastructure and resource control. Additionally, network virtualization controller vendors can integrate their technologies with BIG-IQ via northbound APIs to coordinate and provision application delivery and network services.
• Self-service and automated service provisioning capabilities – With BIG-IQ Cloud, application services can be rapidly provisioned and made available to new users and systems in a matter of minutes. Without automation tools like those offered in BIG-IQ Cloud, IT configurations can take weeks to implement manually. And, using F5 iApps templates, customers can easily create, update, and optimize services to suit their specific application mix, business priorities, and available IT resources.
• Multi-tenant self-service portal for health monitoring – With its convenient management dashboard, BIG-IQ Cloud enables organizations to provide differentiated application delivery and network services while monitoring application health status. Administrators gain the visibility to effectively troubleshoot issues and assist in fault isolation analysis. This is essential for organizations extending their applications into public cloud environments where visibility is required to pinpoint any cause of poor performance or application issues. Moreover, this approach also allows cloud providers to differentiate or tier the application services they provide to customers, increasing their visibility into resource usage and opening up new revenue opportunities. 

Taken together, these capabilities provide enterprise customers and cloud providers with a single, consistent, and actionable view of application delivery and network services, regardless of where these services are implemented. As a result, organizations can simplify IT operations and considerably reduce the amount of time needed to tailor their application delivery systems for the cloud. Customers realize improved productivity with smoother application deployments, simplified management, and a reduction of manual tasks—which in turn lessens the chance of potentially costly configuration errors.

Supporting Quote

“As customers are looking to improve agility, flexibility, and security in their IT infrastructures, many are taking different routes to the cloud,” said Hatem Naguib, VP, Networking and Security at VMware. “Our goal in working with technology partners such as F5 is to create seamless, fast, and secure solutions for customers to configure and deploy their applications with all the necessary network and security services—regardless of how individual IT teams choose to architect their systems. By combining BIG-IQ with VMware solutions, customers are able to scale their applications while maintaining control and visibility.”

Availability

BIG-IQ Cloud is generally available today. Please contact Mountain States Networking to prices and availability.

New Cisco MDS Storage Networking Solutions Help Customers Manage Rapidly Growing Storage Requirements With Greater Performance, Scale, Reliability

As trends such as cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things generate rapidly increasing amounts of data for organizations and users to process and store, IT functions face an ever-increasing demand for better data storage systems capable of coping with these trends. To help them, Cisco today announced new solutions for storage area networks (SANs) that deliver higher performance, scalability and reliability than other competing systems. The new solutions include the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director, which delivers three times the bandwidth of any storage director in the industry. Cisco also announced the Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch, which improves efficiency by performing important storage networking services in the SAN fabric.

Demand from enterprises for data storage systems is growing rapidly. IDC estimates (March 2012) that data storage needs will grow at an annual compound growth rate of 61.4 percent through 2015. As storage systems grow, so too does the need to better integrate these systems with other critical data center infrastructure such as networking and computing systems.  Cisco calls its strategy for delivering this close integration the Unified Data Center.  

Cisco’s storage switching offerings are critical components of the industry’s most advanced and broadest end-to-end data center networking portfolio — a portfolio spanning storage directors, switches, servers, central management and the company’s common operating system, NX-OS. Together, this portfolio helps a wide range of industries, from companies needing faster access to business metrics for better decision making, to medical caregivers accessing information on-demand in examination, treatment, surgical, and patient rooms. 

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

New Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director establishes a new benchmark for performance — delivering 24 terabits per second of total switching capacity, almost three times the bandwidth of any director in the industry.

• Supports both high-density Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet, enabling consistent SAN and LAN networking operations.
• Provides storage connectivity for mission-critical applications, massive amounts of data, solid state drives (SSD) and cloud-based environments without impacting current IT operations.
• Designed for growth without rip-and-replace upgrades, with 24 Tbps of total switching capacity for Fibre Channel that can support growth of any organization beyond what it needs today.
• The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director builds on the MDS heritage of nonstop operations, including software upgrades, by providing the highest fault-tolerant capabilities with fully redundant (N+1) fans, switching fabrics, and power-supplies or grid redundancy (N:N).
• Enabling scalability for any SAN with the new 48-port 16 GB Fibre Channel and 48-port 10 GB FCoE line cards, the Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director supports up to 384 line-rate 16 GB Fibre Channel ports or FCoE in a single 14 RU chassis.
• Operational consistency is provided across the data center, enabling customers to use staff knowledge and existing processes to minimize change management when migrating to new platforms. 

New Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch

The Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch delivers storage services, including Cisco I/O accelerator and Data Mobility Manager, which improve SAN efficiency by performing important storage services centrally in the fabric. This architecture reduces the time and resources required to perform common storage management functions and simplifies and accelerates data protection for regulatory compliance.

• Offers up to 40 line-rate ports of 16GB FC/FICON, 8 ports of 10 GE FCoE, and 2 ports of 1/10GE FCIP/iSCSI, while delivering a rich set of storage services via licensing.
• SAN Extension simplifies data protection and business continuance strategies by enabling backup, remote replication, and other disaster-recovery services over WAN distances using open-standards FCIP tunneling.
• Cisco I/O Accelerator (IOA) provides acceleration for MAN/WAN applications, and wire encryption for backup and replication operations, making disaster recovery and regulatory compliance much easier.
• The Cisco Data Mobility Manager provides the ability to migrate data easily from LUN to LUN or array to array, quickly and without disruption of access to the data. 

Availability

The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director is available now; the Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch is scheduled to be available in Q3 2013. Cisco’s MDS Storage Networking product line is supported and sold by Mountain States Networking.  Please call us for more information @ 801-743-6262

 Cisco announced that MetroPCS Communications, Inc. has begun a commercial launch of its Cisco Carrier-Grade Internet Protocol Version 6 (CGv6) Solution as a first step in the transition of its mobile Internet network to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the latest revision of IP that routes voice, data and video traffic across the Internet. 

MetroPCS, the country’s fifth-largest facilities-based wireless service provider, is also using Cisco Services to perform critical system integration by leading the design, testing and production enablement of IPv6 in a multivendor mobile Internet network. Cisco Services was selected because of its leading IPv6 expertise and experience working with service providers around the world.

MetroPCS has also deployed other Cisco technologies as part of the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution. They are the Cisco ASR 5000 Series, Cisco Carrier Routing System, Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Service Routers in the core and IP aggregation, and the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches, which supports Cisco’s vision of the Internet of Everything (IoE), where billions of connected devices provide a continuous stream of real-time data that can power all kinds of decisions. 

Key Facts / Highlights

• Cisco Services completed the network end-to-end validation work and first-office applications, which required collaborating with many third-party vendors. Cisco oversaw all program management, tools, process and people, resulting in improved efficiencies, which reduced the time for MetroPCS to launch 4G LTE services on IPv6.
• Because of the exponential growth of Internet services, mobile devices and increasing number of end users, MetroPCS is looking at new ways for its current network architecture to meet the needs of, new applications and services. The Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution is designed to enable MetroPCS to meet these challenges and provide new services to its customers.  
• The Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 Solution helps MetroPCS effectively deal with the bottleneck created by the depletion of IPv4 addresses. This Cisco solution complements Cisco’s IPv6 portfolio, the widest and most extensive in the market. Now spanning from the core of the network to the home, Cisco’s IPv6 capabilities have been expanded and added to a wide range of the company’s routers and switches. This provides MetroPCS with a cost-effective and efficient means to bridge to a full IPv6 mobile Internet network while extending the life of existing IPv4 addresses to smoothly manage that migration.
• According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update (2012 to 2017), worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold over the next four years, reaching 11.2 exabytes per month (for an annual run rate of 134 exabytes) by 2017. The expected steady increase in mobile traffic is partly due to continued strong growth in the number of mobile Internet connections (personal devices and machine-to-machine applications), which will exceed the world’s population (United Nations estimates 7.6 billion) by 2017.

SDN, Cloud, Big Data and the Internet of Everything — learn more about the latest tech trends in this interview with Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco.

New project management, secure instant messaging unlock ideas and collaboration from communication silos

VMware, Inc. the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the immediate availability of the latest version of Socialcast by VMware that introduces new capabilities such as integrated project management and secure instant messaging to help increase employee productivity, community engagement and business performance. The new Socialcast addresses the challenge of managing and accessing information trapped in silos by consolidating all activities associated with the daily flow of work into a single location with an intuitive interface that is accessible from any device. Socialcast users can now tap into activity streams, messages, private chats, projects and tasks to efficiently complete assignments to drive business outcomes.

“Although we were named a leader in IDC’s latest MarketScape report, we have not stopped innovating and are committed to delivering on our core promise of helping customers use social tools and practices to discover a better way to work,” said Tim Young, vice president, social enterprise, End-User Computing, VMware. “We continue to advance the product with new capabilities to ensure we deliver the most value to our customers.”

For companies in today’s knowledge economy, competitive advantage is achieved by tapping deeper into the passions, imaginations and ingenuity of employees. Socialcast is the enterprise social networking platform that connects people, conversations and projects in one place to improve communication and collaboration to achieve better results, faster. A recent study of Socialcast end users revealed that 67 percent of community members found Socialcast helps them get answers to their questions faster and 81 percent indicated that being part of their employer’s Socialcast community makes them feel more connected to the company.

“More than 44,000 Philips employees engage through Socialcast to work together, exchange ideas and knowledge, and respond to questions asked by colleagues,” said Dennis Agusi, global internal communications officer, Royal Philips Electronics. “The new Socialcast features allow us to work even more effectively and help us make collaboration even easier.”

Bringing Simplicity and Efficiency to Workflows
Unlike traditional communication and collaboration tools such as email, spreadsheets and intranets, Socialcast eliminates the multiple inboxes and information silos that stifle ideas and drain productivity. By giving employees modern ways to discover and connect, and by integrating social capabilities into the business systems people use every day, Socialcast helps unlock the flow of ideas and innovation across the organization to achieve untapped levels of performance.

New capabilities in Socialcast include:

• Integrated Project Management – With the introduction of Projects, Socialcast integrates project management and activity tracking, providing a single place for the day-to-day flow of work that now spans multiple systems. Socialcast Projects allows teams to track project deliverables, action items and due dates without spreadsheets, emails or status meetings.
• Secure Real-Time Messaging From Anywhere – Socialcast Messenger is a free mobile application companion to Socialcast Private Message that allows users to have ad-hoc conversations with individuals or teams, as well as share files and photos from the road, along with location information. Socialcast Messenger stays synchronized with Socialcast so all work-related communications are in one place.
• Enhanced Community Management – An improved command and control interface for community administrators allows the configuration and customization of communities to fit the unique requirements of their culture. Management of security, employee access, integration with other business systems, auditing and reporting are all centralized.

Pricing and Availability
The latest version of Socialcast is available immediately as an on-premise or SaaS solution.

Innovative Cisco Unified Data Center Technology and Solutions to Reduce Complexity and Accelerate Time-to-Value

Cisco has announced a range of new joint technologies and integrated solutions targeting data centers that use Microsoft Corp.’s Cloud OS technologies. By combining the Cisco Unified Data Center architecture with Microsoft Fast Track architecture solutions, Cisco and Microsoft are helping customers reduce complexity, improve IT productivity and enhance business agility. 

Cisco and Microsoft are also delivering on go-to-market initiatives for jointly vetted solutions that help enable channel partners who resell both Cisco data center and Microsoft Cloud OS technologies to grow their data center business and better solve customer issues.

Highlights:

• The Cisco Unified Data Center technology and Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 architecture solutions mitigate the complexity of the data center and help to enable simplified deployment, operations, and increased productivity.
• The Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 solutions reduce complexity and boost productivity by simplifying the management of combined Cisco and Microsoft data center environments. They also enhance business agility by giving organizations the ability to provision data center resources more quickly. By giving Microsoft customers programmatic access to the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Cisco is also giving customers far more insight and control over how Cisco Unified Data Center elements work with Windows Server and application software.
• Technology Innovation:
  • Through the combination of the Cisco Nexus 1000V Series, a comprehensive and extensible virtual and cloud networking platform, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Extensible Switch and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1, customers who wish to virtualize certain aspects of their data center networks can do so alongside physical networking and cloud computing infrastructure.
  • Cisco UCS combines the powerful Manager open API and Cisco PowerTool for Microsoft’s PowerShell utility with System Center 2012 SP1 managing and provisioning tools. As a result, customers are able to provision, configure, orchestrate and monitor physical and virtual infrastructures and Windows Server and application software at every level.
  • With the Cisco UCS Management Pack for System Center 2012 SP1 Operations Manager, customers are able to monitor and manage their Cisco Unified Data Center with a single interface.
  • The Cisco UCS Integration Pack for System Center 2012 SP1 Orchestrator improves operational efficiency and delivers scalable and consistent Cisco UCS management through out-of-the-box run-books.
  • The Cisco UCS UI Extension Add-in for System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager provides centralized management of Cisco UCS by allowing access to Cisco UCS management controls from within System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 Solutions: Cisco is offering new Microsoft Fast Track Solutions, which give customers the choice of either integrated reference architectures with Cisco and EMC (VSPEX  Proven Infrastructure) or with Cisco and NetApp (FlexPod, both of which have been validated for the Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 program and feature support for Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1.

• VSPEX Solution for Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 3.0 offers a simple, fully integrated, rapidly deployable Microsoft-based private cloud upon which customers can easily manage the applications that run their businesses.
• FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud offers a turnkey platform, designed jointly by NetApp and Cisco, and built on a defined set of hardware and software for IaaS environments based on Microsoft platforms. The solution features management, automation and orchestration capabilities integrated with Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 and PowerShell for the efficient and accelerated deployment of services and applications

• Go-to-Market: Cisco and Microsoft intend to roll out targeted channel initiatives in select countries to enable alignment in selling Microsoft Fast Track 3.0 architecture solutions

F5′s Vision for Purrimeter Security. Protecting the connected world from the next generation of malicious activity requires a “laser” focus. Here at F5 Labs, we take this very seriously by pursuing technological leaps and bounds. F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers and Application Firewall Managers already dramatically extend the security perimeter, and in the future, with Laser Cats, we will extend perimeter protection even further—and stop wrongdoing before it starts.

Today you can still take advantage of the latest, most scalable security solutions to protect your organization, including our enhanced application delivery firewall solutions and BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager.