The Future of the Cell Site is the Router

Evolving Cell Site to Multi-Service Cell Site

With 2G, Cell Sites were primarily (designed around circuit-switched TDM Based connectivity and ) responsible for enabling Voice traffic. As the 3G/4G picked up momentum, Cell Sites were upgraded to carry (IP based traffic for) both Voice and Data traffic. This upgrade of Cell Site functionality aligned well with the profitability of Operators. The networks which were aggressive in this transition of Cell Site enabled the profitability. With the 5G around the corner, the role of the Cell Site will be even more crucial. It plays a critical role in adding a new revenue stream, enhance the current offering, and build the business case for 5G adoption. Cell Sites would need to evolve to Multi-Service Site which would offer new revenue-generating streams like B2B service for Small Enterprises and SMB customers, enhanced user experience for social media and streaming services, public safety applications, IOT/Smart City applications, and far edge use cases.

For the Multi-Service Cell Site – it’s imperative that it would demand much higher bandwidth, resiliency, and significantly lower latency. However, most of the Cell Site deploys sub-optimal architecture with layer 2 technologies. While layer 2 solutions have a lower capex, they tend to have higher opex and extremely restrictive in terms of new service creation. To realize the full potential of the Cell Site, it’s critical to bring Layer3 to Cell Site. The backhaul networks have already evolved from MPLS-TP / TDM to Layer3/IP-MPLS-SR. Extending these technologies to Cell Site will bring significant benefits to the service which can be delivered.

Cisco Converged 5G Transport

Let’s look at some of the key benefits of such evolved architecture:

Robust Infrastructure: The Infrastructure which enabled 3G/4G will not be sufficient to fully realize the potential of the Multi-Service Cell Site. It needs to secure, redundant, reliable, scalable, and SDN enabled. Any compromise on this aspect could result in sub-optimal performance of the network. Using Router/Layer3 based devices at the Cell Site would enable:

◉ Site Sharing/Densification

◉ Best in class Timing capability with Class C precision and SyncE up to the cell site

◉ Carrier-Class Reliability and Redundancy

◉ Consistent OAM end to end

◉ Trust Worthy System with complete visibility of Device Security health.

Service Agility: As we look ahead and build a business case for 5G investment, every network port in the cell site would be viewed as a service port. Uniform function availability / Flexibility and consistency of features will be of utmost importance. The gateway device at the cell Site should have the capability of Network Slicing / Service Demarcation / Quality of Service / Monitoring capability of Service and seamless integration. The Cell Site router provides all the capabilities mentioned along with:

◉ Ease of Integrating 5G Core with AMF/SMF/UPF.

◉ End to End Network Slicing

◉ Seamless Service provisioning & workflow

◉ Consistent QoS across the network

◉ Consistent Service Monitoring across the network.

Operational benefits: Apart from the Capex investment and generating the business case for new revenue-generating streams, the subject of Operational Expenditure has also been the primary part of the 5G journey. It’s unfathomable to build a network that relies on manual intervention apart from racking and stacking activities. Using Router at Cell Site will make the operation seamless and aligned to the rest of the networks. Consistent Tools cross the network allow for stronger control over the network. While the Backhaul & Edge networks have been using the Automation capabilities for a while, given the remoteness of Cell Site – it’s even more critical to have an Automation-first approach for the Cell Site. Features like ZTP, Telemetry

◉ End to End Automation and tighter integration with backhaul.

◉ End to End Layer3/IP for consistent reporting & analytics

◉ Reduced network Touch Points

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Drive business efficiency with secure remote work technology

Remote work is nothing new. In fact, it might be one of the most dominant phrases in 2020’s word cloud. The good news is that with the right technology in place, remote work can deliver benefits across your organization.

Cloud-delivered solutions enable remote workers to remain productive, efficient, and secure – even from the couch. All while helping drive down costs. And with the tips below, you can get even more out of your remote work experience.

Secure your remote workspaces

The three most important words in real estate are location, location, location. In remote work, they’re security, security, security.

The FBI has seen a 300 percent – yes 300 percent – increase in cybercrime since the start of COVID-19. With multiple sites to protect, and employees using home networks and personal devices, remote work opens you up to increased risk. You need to give your remote employees and your business the confidence to collaborate safely with security solutions that:

◉ Offer built-in encryption

◉ Ensure secure endpoint access for any device in your network

◉ Protect sensitive data with robust identity verification for users and devices

◉ Allow employees to communicate and share files securely

◉ Defend against threats with cloud-delivered security

Keep collaboration simple

Login issues, dropped connections, poor audio quality, and other issues like blurry video can affect your team’s ability to work together. Give your employees access to reliable, high-quality voice, video, and messaging in a single solution. Choose collaboration technology that allows employees to:

◉ Seamlessly communicate and collaborate across devices

◉ Share messages and files quickly 1:1 or with a whole team

◉ Quickly find conversations and documents

◉ Brainstorm using a digital whiteboard

◉ Integrate with the apps they use every day

◉ Record meetings and get automatic transcripts

Reduce IT complexity

IT should work for you, not vice versa. Make sure your collaboration technology helps you maximize your time while minimizing your IT hassles. To that end, look for simplified solutions that:

◉ Effortlessly integrate virtual meetings, calling, WiFi, and security

◉ Can easily be deployed and managed by employees who might not have IT skills

◉ Scale with you as your business needs change

Cisco Designed Secure Remote Work  

Fortunately, you don’t have to look far to find the right work from anywhere technology. At Cisco, our small business portfolio includes the collaboration and security solutions you need to simplify, secure, and support your remote work environments. With Cisco Designed Secure Remote Work, you get everything your business needs to deliver an exceptional remote work experience.

◉ Cisco Webex®: Make it easy for your remote teams to meet, securely share messages and files, search for information, private message, group chat, brainstorm, and work together efficiently.

◉ Cisco Secure Access by Duo: Protect your remote workers’ sensitive data with robust two-factor security that verifies the identity of users, devices, and applications attempting to access your data.

◉ Cisco UmbrellaTM: Protect remote users wherever they’re working with flexible, fast, and effective front-line security by blocking malicious destinations before a connection is established.

◉ Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defense: Scan all your email, internal and external, without difficult technical challenges or interrupting the regular delivery of messages from the cloud while detecting and blocking threats.

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How I Got Started with Network Automation

Recently I joined the Cisco DevNet team as a Content Developer Engineer. This is exciting for me, because I have an opportunity to merge the two things that I love most: learning more about network automation and helping the IT community grow within their skills.

This year marks 20 years that I have been in information technology. I’ve seen the industry change multiple times, and right now we are in the middle of another major shift. That shift is being driven by organizations needing to expand and extend their networks, resources and services rapidly and at scale. In other words, automation.

By the end of this post, I will share my journey into network automation, Cisco Systems, as well as provide you with everything you need to join the #DevNetClassOf2020. Quick note: I am also going to let you know how you can get a 25% off exam voucher too!

How I started with Network Automation

In my career, the greatest rewards have come when I have stepped outside of my comfort zone and taken some risks. From joining the Military (USAF), to starting my YouTube channel, learning Python, and now being a part of Cisco Systems. Each one of these moments has helped me get to where I am today. Now that I am here, I am committed to helping you walk, run, and fly in network automation! Are you ready to step outside of your comfort zone?

Three years ago, I was a Systems Administrator working in a comfortable government position. Back then, I thought I would never need to learn to code. To be honest, I could have stayed in that environment, but I decided to take a risk so that I could follow my passion which is network engineering.

In that position, I was tasked with some highly visible projects that drove me to learn the programming language Python. My road to this point has been awesome. I am DevOps certified, DevNet certified, and I have been in a NetDevOps role for the past year. Balancing software sprints and network engineering have prepared me for this new role within Cisco Systems.

Learning Python

People ask me often, “do you need to know Python as a network engineer?” The answer is no you do not… That is until you need a tool to perform a task that has not yet been created. Python gives you the ability to customize and create applications as you need them.

When I first began coding, I could have started with Ansible. However, I found Netmiko to be one of the best tools available for network automation. Because it allowed me to write my python scripts and then parse my return data exactly as I needed. So, I started there. My first automation script was to change the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) configuration for over 300 devices in our network. My second automation script was to update the enable secret password on 700 devices. All of this was achieved in under 50 lines of code. This task normally would take days, to manually login and update each router and switch. But with the power of automation, I took about a day to write and test my code in a nonproduction environment. Then about 30 minutes to run and verify the completion of my script in production.

How you can get started

When I started automating, learning resources were scarce on these topics. Now, you have a great opportunity to leverage platforms like the DevNet sandbox. Here you can access multiple Cisco platforms and labs that will walk you through utilizing tools like Python, Postman, and Ansible to configure and manage your networks. Many of these resources are free and always available. If you are totally brand new to automation, I recommend you visit the “Start Now” page on DevNet to get started.

Get DevNet Certified

One of the top questions being asked of network engineers right now is, can you automate? Organizations want to manage their networks more effectively and efficiently. The Cisco DevNet Associates certification can set you on the path to do that. The certificates not only validates your skillset but also will add value to your resume to help you stand out. Lastly, the DevNet Associates certification will give you the ability to speak the same language as software developers and other automation stakeholders.

Here’s a link for a 25% off exam voucher. If you pass before the end of the year, you will get a cool digital badge, free DevNet merchandise, access to special DevNet sessions with the one and only Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco DevNet & CX Ecosystem Success. 

Call to Action

If I can automate, so can you! Change is inevitable and the more you embrace it, the further ahead you will be. I wish you much success on your automation journey. I look forward to welcoming you to the #DevNetClassof2020.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco MDS 9000 and IBM FICON: Just Got Married Again

We know humans like to celebrate. The wedding date represents a significant one for many couples and there is a tradition to celebrate again, even if with less fanfare, upon reaching a specific amount of years together. Apparently originated from an ancient German tradition, there is also a symbolic name to represent how long ago the wedding occurred. For example, the golden wedding indicates 50 years of marriage.

Cisco MDS 9000 series and IBM mainframe FICON have not reached that level yet. The original wedding date was in 2004, and 2020 marks 16 years, assuming my math is not wrong. There is a name for this, despite not popularly used. It is called ivy wedding….but don’t ask me why.

IBM originally announced FICON channels for the S/390 system in May of 1998. Since then, FICON has evolved from 1 Gbit to the 16 Gbit FICON Express16S channels, announced in January 2015 in conjunction with the IBM Systems z13. Each generation of FICON channels offered increased performance and capacity. Initially, the FC-SB-2 Fibre Channel upper-level protocol (ULP) was used by FICON. As the name implies, a single byte (SB) link address was used to specify the switch port on the director, out of a range of 00-255. It supported key features like native FICON storage devices, channel-to-channel connections, FICON directors (or switches), and more. But it did not allow for switched paths over multiple directors. In 2003, with the introduction of a new and enhanced ULP, this limitation was removed. In fact, FC-SB-3 employs a dual byte address.

Funny enough, rather than changing the name from SB to DB, it was decided to change the version instead, increasing its number from 2 to 3. This was the beginning of cascaded FICON. Two directors per fabric, also known as single-hop cascading, became possible since then. Recently multi-hop cascading has been qualified and has opened up new deployment options. Fibre Channel Single-Byte-4 (FC-SB-4) standard followed in 2008 and accounted for a big step forward in terms of performance, by reducing FICON channel overhead with the introduction of the high-performance FICON for System Z (zHPF).

A few years later, FC-SB-5 was standardized and in 2020 work is still in progress for the FC-SB-6 standard and new improvements are expected. Meanwhile, new routing schemas have come along, specifically FICON Dynamic Routing (FIDR), creating an exchange-based routing model (OXID-based routing). Meanwhile, the mainframe gained enhanced monitoring capabilities for switching devices with a revamped version of the CUP protocol.

Just as the protocol and the topologies have evolved over time, the same is true for requirements, expectations, and underlying hardware products. Cisco MDS 9000 series has just completed the most stringent testing and validation exercise, successfully receiving its latest FICON certification letter and can be found on the IBM resource link page (registration is needed to access this website).

With software version, NX OS 8.4(2b), Cisco MDS 9710, MDS 9706, and MDS 9250i and their IBM c-type counterpart have renewed their approval for use within mainframe environments with the full feature set. It is a great achievement, putting Cisco MDS 9000 series at the center of customers’ preferences when it comes to both FICON and Fibre Channel switching. Specifically, the new certification adds support for:

◉ IBM Fiber Channel Endpoint Security

◉ CUP Diagnostics

◉ Support for z/OS health checker

◉ 16G and 32G ELW optics for extended reach on dark fiber

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Cisco CCNP Collaboration 350-801 Certification Practice Test

 

Cisco CLCOR Exam Description:

This exam tests a candidate's knowledge of implementing core collaboration technologies including infrastructure and design, protocols, codecs, and endpoints, Cisco IOS XE gateway and media resources, Call Control, QoS, and collaboration applications. The course, Implementing Cisco Collaboration Core Technologies, helps candidates to prepare for this exam.

Cisco 350-801 Exam Overview:

• Exam Name:- Implementing Cisco Collaboration Core Technologies
• Exam Number:- 350-801 CLCOR
• Exam Price:- $400 USD
• Duration:- 120 minutes
• Number of Questions:- 90-110
• Passing Score:- Variable (750-850 / 1000 Approx.)
• Recommended Training:- Implementing Cisco Collaboration Core Technologies (CLCOR)
• Exam Registration:- PEARSON VUE
• Sample Questions:- Cisco 350-801 Sample Questions
• Practice Exam:- Cisco Certified Network Professional Collaboration Practice Test

Related Articles:-

1. Pass CCNP 350-801 CLCOR Exam and Enjoy Benefits It Draws
2. It’s High Time to Take Cisco 350-801 Certification Exam
3. Your Journey to Being CCNP Collaboration 350-801 Certified Made Easier

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Cisco DNA Spaces helps businesses weather the pandemic

As we wrap 2020, I want to reflect on the year gone by and what it meant for us folks at Cisco DNA Spaces. I think we can all agree that 2020 was a year like no other. It was a time of crisis, it was a period of upheaval; but it was also a period of innovation and transformation for location analytics products.

DNA Spaces is Cisco’s indoor location and IoT services cloud platform.  It enables Cisco Catalyst and Meraki wireless customers to use their existing network to drive digitization within their buildings.

In a world where our websites and mobile apps are becoming smarter by the day, DNA Spaces was launched with the vision to make buildings smarter, for our customers to drive seamless Wi-Fi onboarding for people and IoT devices, for loyalty based differentiated experiences and for behavioral analytics across your business locations.

Prior to Covid-19, we fulfilled our industry’s need for location analytics, behavioral insights, engagement and onboarding tools. In the two years since launch we are the most deployed indoor location services platform in the world, with over 120,000 global business locations on the platform at present. Most customers used the platform to set up Wi-Fi onboarding, engagement rules, locate assets or collect monthly analytics reports and stats on how their locations were performing. Setup DNA Spaces one time and you are all set from an indoor location services perspective.

And then the pandemic hit.

New circumstances require new solutions

Schools and universities closed without notice. Companies went remote overnight. Stores had to close for in-person shopping. Venues had to cancel their events. The Covid-19 crisis was turning out to be most difficult for our customers that operated out of physical locations.

As the state and federal governments started imposing restrictions and social distancing became a survival tactic, everyone woke up to the importance of understanding how people move and interact within buildings—not just in retrospect but in real time. Navigating the global pandemic required enterprises, policymakers and health officials to understand indoor location behavior trends intimately and use those insights to drive safety and compliance.

The product team at Cisco DNA Spaces saw this as an opportunity to help the community adapt for long-term business resiliency. For a product whose mission is to digitize physical spaces, it was clear that if there was ever a moment we could make an impact, it was now.

Pivoting to meet immediate demands

Our team decided to quickly pivot and reprioritize our product roadmap to include apps that would help customers respond to the pandemic and prepare them to safely get back to business. At the heart of our product pivot strategy were our users. We engaged in conversation with them at every step – acknowledged their needs, collected their feedback, understood their point of view.

Any product team will tell you that taking new features to market with a very short runway isn’t exactly an ideal scenario. But we learnt that if your purpose is clear, if your whole team is onboard and if executed well, the experience can be extremely gratifying.

We tapped into some of our core features and repurposed them to build apps more relevant to the new needs created by the pandemic. This resulted in a suite of apps that facilitate a safe return to work in a suite of Back to Business apps and features, including:

◉ Proximity Reporting App for contact tracing based on wi-fi presence

◉ Right Now App for real-time people count and behavioral monitoring on a single pane across your business locations

◉ Density threshold-based triggers for safe capacities and social distancing

◉ Instant Captive Portals for contact-less customer experiences

Smoothing the path to adoption

We built and shipped these apps in the shortest time possible. But our work was far from over. How could we scale adoption at a time when customers were working from home and short on both time and money?

Our adoption strategy was based on two key principles:

1. We ensured that all new features would work with zero support– no training, no long customer meetings and no demo. We wanted it to be possible for customers to sign-up, activate and deploy the new Covid-19 apps in 30 minutes or less. This required heavy focus on simplifying and scaling onboarding, providing in-product guidance and proactively addressing support issues with 24/7 service-level agreements (SLAs).

2. We opened up our tier offerings for everyone as a free trial so customers who hadn’t yet adopted DNA Spaces could get started and do contact tracing, monitor real time occupancy within their buildings and deliver contactless experiences. Every Cisco wireless customer deserved to make their buildings safe for business.

Build it and they will come

Over 300 Cisco enterprise customers deployed the new features across 50,000 business locations in the first 60 days after release, leading to improved management of social distancing in places like retail stores, workspaces, hospitals, universities, malls across the world.

The positive response and validation motivated us to stretch ourselves even further and make our apps ready for Meraki as well.

Countless hours and many sleepless nights went into building and shipping these features but all of our efforts were rewarded when we received the ‘Customer Choice’ recognition on Gartner Peer Insights. To be recognized for the value that DNA Spaces continues to deliver was the icing on the cake. The real reward has been the opportunity to share the journey with our customers and be part of their commitments to caring for their employees, customers and communities.

Looking back, but actually looking ahead

As I look back on 2020 one last time, I see what a tough year it has been for all of us. But I also realize that if we broaden our perspective just a little, life becomes that much easier. That said, I believe that for the product and engineering team at Cisco DNA Spaces, 2020 was a year of courage and shared responsibility. But most of all, 2020 was the year of indoor location services – a year when our product found its true relevance and meaning. We will go into 2021 with all our learnings and I believe, we will all be better for it.

Source: cisco.com

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Enabling Innovation in Customer Experience while Optimizing the Multi-Cloud: Part Two

As you read in part one of this blog, due to the pandemic and the resultant exponential increase in digital transactions, Customer Experience is far more paramount than ever before, across all demographics. It is imperative that as financial institutions embrace multi-cloud, the impact of how services are consumed from different clouds but presented in a consistent manner for the desired Customer Experience is vital.

Impact of the Multi-cloud environment on CX

As institutions go Cloud-All-In to enable this digital transformation, an application customer transaction will bounce across multiple clouds before reaching the end goal. In the recent State of the Cloud 2020 Report by Flexera, customers indicated that their #1 initiative is to reduce cloud bills, but their #2 is go move more workloads to the cloud. This is mainly due to the fact that existing individual cloud-provided tools are not integrated and create data silos. Also, most companies are unable to connect the dots between poor digital performance and the cost to the business. Most importantly, executives want — but don’t have — real-time performance metrics of their applications. There were consistent patterns found when CXO’s were asked how they assure application performance, namely:

◉ They over-provision – on an average 20% more, which is expensive.

◉ They monitor for alerts, which doesn’t always prevent the problems in the first place. In fact, people tell us that they ignore most of the alerts.

◉ They troubleshoot issues with people, which no longer scales given the volume and complexity of workloads.

◉ And they suffer with slow applications. Few companies tell us that they can “assure performance”.

When application workloads get the resources they need, when they need them:

◉ Your applications would perform as designed – no more resource contention.

◉ You’d be able to get the most out of your data center infrastructure.

◉ Sticker shock would be a thing of the past for your cloud projects.

◉ With the infrastructure constraints gone, you would not have to relax your policies.

◉ And best of all, your developers would have time and flexibility to innovate instead of chasing alerts.

The issue is around providing that flexibility for the DevOps teams to experiment at scale  as costs are kept in control, ensuring compliance is maintained and operationally the services are manageable, while assuring application performance is above par. As you constantly aim to find that equilibrium, there are 5 key areas one must keep in mind:

1. Assuring your applications: Do you understand your application portfolio ‘beyond the CMDB’ ? How will you be prioritizing your application migration? What KPIs will you use to baseline and measure success?

2. Streamline your operations: Will you be enabling developers to deploy infrastructure on demand? On multiple clouds? How do you plan to cost-optimize your infra?

3. Multi-cloud & cloud hosting: How will you develop the right level of abstraction across multiple clouds? How will developers manage container platforms across multiple clouds? How will you host legacy workloads?

4. Multi-cloud Optimized Networks: How will you achieve common operations, policy, visibility, and performance across multiple clouds? How will you assure and secure user experience to any cloud from anywhere?

5. Zero Trust Security: How will you deliver a cloud-ready security policy across multiple clouds, without slowing developers down? How does your cloud security strategy fit with your overall security strategy?

Taking a holistic solution approach

The true value of the application is not just on the hosting but on the consumption. Providing end to end connectivity, security, assurance and visibility to consume the apps is the key, looking at it consistently is the right way to provide the desired outcomes.

Cloud Hosting: Create cloud-agnostic, cloud native software solutions to enable and optimize your multi-cloud. Cloud-agnosticism means different services consumed from different clouds but presented in a consistent manner across clouds.

Cloud Consumption: Providing end-to-end connectivity, security, assurance, and visibility to consume those services across all clouds.

All cloud providers within themselves have strong capabilities, but as you undoubtedly are embracing multi-cloud, it’s imperative to be able to create consistent services across multiple clouds or as some people like to say – keeping the cloud providers honest. Thereby giving your development teams the flexibility to meet and surpass business asks and expectations, when it comes to the digital experience from their applications, but do it while keeping costs in check, maintain compliance and operational teams happy too.

Thus, evolving your applications experience not just from a FUNCTIONAL one to a JOYFUL one, but further raising the entire digital experience to a MEANINGFUL one. Thereby increasing your brand value and in-turn your desired customer recall.

Realizing this vision, backed by a business case

Cisco has always been at the forefront of providing the underlying infrastructure in enabling the expected connected experience, enabling businesses to get the most out of their ever-changing foundational layer. Cisco’s Performance IT program takes a consultative approach to assessing how your current multi-cloud environment is set up to help achieve your expected application experience. Keeping business outcomes in mind, Performance IT takes a 360˚ view of architectural transition, operational efficiency, and financial oversight in one go. It provides organizations with an architectural blueprint and a target operating model to demonstrate how this architecture can be run effectively. The cherry on top is the financial benefit in making this possible and setting up your teams to assure application performance in a multi-cloud environment of the future.

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