At Cisco we are pleased to kick off 2021 with an exciting update to the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan that continues our mission to drive experiences that are 10x better than in-person interactions, help organizations collaborate seamlessly, and transform employee and customer experiences to power an inclusive future for all.
Friday 29 January 2021
Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan Now Includes an all New Comprehensive and Cost-Effective Offer for Education
Thursday 28 January 2021
Your Journey to the All-New Webex
All-New Webex
At WebexOne, we launched new programs to support and work through how current Meetings and Jabber on-premise customers can update to the all-new Webex.
Over the past year, we all experienced how the workplace fundamentally changed, and how connecting with our work colleagues, regardless of where or how you work, is vital to continuity. Today, users need the capabilities to work remotely, collaborate with their teams effortlessly and work together regardless of time zones. Workloads must come together to allow for this seamless collaboration experience.
These new update programs outline steps for how customers can update from Jabber on-premise IM/P to secure Cloud Messaging and move from a standalone Meetings experience to a full modern collaboration solution, all contained within a single application.
For those customers who wish to remain with Jabber on-premise Messaging and in a standalone Meetings application we will continue to offer both these solutions.
Supporting Your Journey
Whether you are updating from Jabber or Meetings, the team at Webex has developed supporting sites to guide you on your journey. Let’s jump in to unpack what is available for you.
Deployment Steps
Technical Workshops
Gaining Analytical Insight
End User Adoption
IT & User Community
Bringing it All Together
Find Out More
Tuesday 26 January 2021
Introduction to Terraform with Cisco ACI, Part 1
Many customers are starting to look at third party tools such as Terraform and Ansible to deploy and manage their infrastructure and applications. In this five-part series we’ll introduce Terraform and understand how it’s used with Cisco products such as ACI. Over the coming weeks this blog series will cover:
1. Introduction to Terraform
2. Terraform and ACI
3. Explanation of the Terraform configuration files
4. Terraform Remote State and Team Collaboration
5. Terraform Providers – How are they built?
Code Example
https://github.com/conmurphy/intro-to-terraform-and-aci
Infrastructure as Code
Before diving straight in, let’s quickly explore the category of tool in which Terraform resides, Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Rather than directly configuring devices through CLI or GUI, IaC is a way of describing the desired state with text files. These text files are read by the IaC tool (e.g. Terraform) which implements the required configuration.
Imagine a sysadmin needs to configure their VCenter/ESXi cluster including data centres, clusters, networks, and VMs. One option would be to click through the GUI to configure each of the required settings. Not only does this take time, but also may introduce configuration drift as individual settings are configured over the lifetime of the platform.
Recording the desired configuration settings in a file and using an IaC tool eliminates the need to click through a GUI, thus reducing the time to deployment.
Additionally, the tool can monitor the infrastructure (e.g Vcenter) and ensure the desired configuration in the file matches the infrastructure.
Here are a couple of extras benefits provided by Infrastructure as Code:
- Reduced time to deployment
- See above
- Additionally, infrastructure can quickly be re-deployed and configured if a major error occurs.
- Eliminate configuration drift
- See above
- Increase team collaboration
- Since all the configuration is represented in a text file, colleagues can quickly read and understand how the infrastructure has been configured
- Accountability and change visibility
- Text files describing configuration can be stored using version control software such as Git, along with the ability to view the config differences between two versions.
- Manage more than a single product
- Most, if not all, IaC tools would work across multiple products and domains, providing you the above mentioned benefits from a single place.
Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.
There are a couple of components of Terraform which we will now walk through.
Configuration Files
Resources and Providers
Variables and Properties
State Files
Commands
terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply
terraform destroy
Monday 25 January 2021
Co-Packaged Optics and an Open Ecosystem
Some technology transitions are easy to spot and their adoption is inevitable. The only question is when the transition happens and how quickly will it be adopted.
Co-packaged optics (CPO), or in-package optics (IPO) depending on your terminology, is one of those technologies. Bringing optics and switch silicon together in the same package creates a synergy between once disjoint and independent technologies thereby saving significant power.
Analyzing Historical Trends – Switch Silicon
Analyzing Historical Trends – Copper to Optical
Power – The Ultimate Limiting Factor
Minimizing Interconnect Power
Why 51.2T?
Creating an Ecosystem
Sunday 24 January 2021
Dynamic Service Chaining in a Data Center with Nexus Infrastructure
In an application-centric data center, the network needs to have maximum agility to manage workloads and incorporate services such as firewalls, load balancers, proxies and optimizers. These network services enhance compliance, security, and optimization in virtualized data centers and cloud networks. Data center ops teams need an elegant method to insert service nodes and have the ability to automatically redirect traffic using predefined rules as operations change.
Enterprises running their data centers on the Nexus 9000 and NX-OS platform can now seamlessly integrate service nodes into their data center and edge deployments using the new Cisco Enhanced Policy Based Redirect (ePBR) to easily define and manage rules that control how traffic is redirected to individual services.
Challenges with Service Insertion and Service Chaining
The biggest challenge when it comes to introducing service nodes in a data center is onboarding them into the fabric, and subsequently creating the traffic redirection rules. Today, there are two ways of implementing traffic redirection rules – by influencing the traffic path using routing metrics, or by selective traffic redirection using policy-based routing.
The challenge with using routing to influence the forwarding path is that all traffic traverses the same path. This often ends up making the service node a bottle neck. The only practical way to achieve scale is by vertically scaling the node, which is expensive and limited by the extent the node can be expanded.
Policy Based Routing (PBR) rules are also complex to maintain since separate rules are needed for forward and reverse traffic directions in order to maintain symmetry for stateful service nodes. In addition, when there are multiple service nodes in a chain, maintaining PBR rules to redirect traffic across them increases complexity even more.
Introducing Enhanced Policy Based Redirect
NX-OS version 9.3(5) provides Enhanced Policy Based Redirect. The goal of ePBR is to solve some of the challenges with existing redirection rules. In a nutshell, ePBR:
◉ Simplifies onboarding service nodes into the network
◉ Creates selective traffic redirection rules across a single node or a chain of service nodes
◉ Auto-generates reverse redirection rules to maintain symmetry across a service node chain
◉ Provides the ability to redirect and load-balance
◉ Supports pre-defined and customizable probes to monitor the health of service nodes
◉ Supports the ability to either drop traffic, bypass a node, or fallback to routing lookup when a node in a chain fails
ePBR supports all of these capabilities across a fabric running VXLAN with BGP EVPN, as well as a classic core, aggregation, access data center deployment, at line rate switching, with no penalty to throughput or performance. Let’s look at three ePBR use cases.
Use Case 1: ePBR for Selective Traffic Redirection
Various applications may require redirection across different sets of service nodes. With ePBR, redirection rules can match application traffic using Source Destination IP and L4 ports and redirect them across different service nodes or service chains. In the diagram below, client traffic for Application 1 traverses the firewall and IPS, whereas Application 2 traverses the proxy before reaching the server. This flexibility that ePBR enables customers to on-board multiple applications on their network and comply with security requirements.
Use Case 2: Selective Traffic Redirection Across Active/Standby Service Node Chain
Use Case 3: Load-Balancing Across Service Nodes
Saturday 23 January 2021
Cisco’s Role in the Monumental Vaccination Effort
Big challenges require big solutions. But when it comes to technology for coronavirus vaccine access and administration, many of those big solutions already exist.
As you read this, COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out in different capacities around the world. The troubling news is, getting the vaccines to the public is continuing to present an evolving array of challenges. Limited availability, complex transportation and storage, and phasing are all creating confusion. The good news is that technology is helping to overcome those challenges by building bridges between the government agencies in charge of the vaccination effort, the retail pharmacies and healthcare organizations administering the vaccines, and the communities who need them.
During the past nine months, Cisco has been powering an inclusive recovery through efficient vaccine administration; helping essential organizations stand up the technology and communications needed by medical and healthcare facilities, retail pharmacies, essential government services, and other frontline efforts. And, today, Cisco continues to do its part as a trusted technology partner. We’re helping enable vaccine administration by improving three key functions—communications and access, field operations and administration, and security and application performance.
Communications and access
By providing communications and access solutions—such as Cisco Webex and Webex Contact Center—we’re enabling better patient access and outreach, better care provider and administrative collaboration, and more virtual engagements. We’re also providing a more comprehensive way for government agencies, healthcare facilities, and retail sites to efficiently scale their efforts to address increased volume and equitable access to critical information and services.
Field operations and administration
With field operations and administration solutions—like networking, WiFi analytics, video, collaboration, and cloud-delivered location services and security—we’re helping organizations respond to dynamic community needs, set up field hospitals and mobile clinics, provide equitable access, improve citizen experiences, and simplify equipment monitoring.
Security and application performance
Finally, our innovative security and application performance tools—among them, application monitoring and management, IoT sensors, cameras, and cloud-enabled security—are ensuring the safety, security, privacy, performance, and compliance necessary for organizations to successfully administer vaccines and operate efficiently around the clock.
As you can imagine, vaccine administration systems will likely remain under immense pressure until the millions of people who need vaccinations get them. So, it is vital for government, healthcare, and retail organizations to keep these mission-critical services running as smoothly as technologically possible. That, as it turns out, is our strong suit.
Keep in mind, performing in this capacity is nothing new for Cisco. All of the solutions and use cases mentioned above are customer-validated and proven.
As it always has, Cisco provides its customers with solutions that help people and communities access technology, information, advice, and anything else they might require. We were here for our customers before the pandemic. We’re here for them today as we navigate our way through COVID-19 together. And as any trusted partner should, we will be here for our customers tomorrow to take on whatever comes next. That’s why so many leaders around the world, across all levels of government, healthcare, and retail, have trusted and relied on us to stand by them through their ongoing digital transformation efforts.
Thursday 21 January 2021
300-715 Free Exam Questions & Latest Cisco CCNP Security Study Guide
Cisco SISE Exam Description:
Cisco 300-715 Exam Overview:
- Exam Name:- Implementing and Configuring Cisco Identity Services Engine
- Exam Number:- 300-715 SISE
- Exam Price:- $300 USD
- Duration:- 90 minutes
- Number of Questions:- 55-65
- Passing Score:- Variable (750-850 / 1000 Approx.)
- Recommended Training:- Implementing and Configuring Cisco Identity Services Engine (SISE)
- Exam Registration:- PEARSON VUE
- Sample Questions:- Cisco 300-715 Sample Questions
- Practice Exam:- Cisco Certified Network Professional Security Practice Test