Cisco ACI: Is It Wham! or Sam Cooke?

An odd little title, I think you will agree, but consider this: Wham! had a hit with “Freedom” and Sam Cooke sang “Chain Gang,” and I think you can now see my thought process. This post is going to investigate not the technical capabilities of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), but rather what its market …

Stacking Up Rackspace Options

Rackspace’s future has been in question since CEO Lanham Napier stepped down in February of 2014. While Rackspace is a profitable company, it must be feeling the squeeze from larger players like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google. Amazon and Google in particular have slashed prices for their Platform as a Service (PaaS) products, leaving …

Cisco Cloud Services Positions Cisco to Compete in the Cloud

When you hear the term “cloud computing,” Amazon, Google, VMware, and Microsoft are the companies that you most likely think of first. Well, it seems Cisco Systems wants a spot on that list of companies known for their cloud services. Cisco announced in March that it plans to begin offering Cisco Cloud Services to its …

OpFlex, Standards-Based Protocols, and Cisco’s Messaging Problem

On April second, Cisco introduced something that seems to make a lot of sense in its new declarative-based, ACI-led world of software-defined networking: a policy mechanism. The blog post about it was pretty straightforward: it included the obligatory nods toward the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and open-source communities, defined the differences between the traditional …

Network Virtualization: Not Just for the Service Provider

Many network virtualization products appear to be aimed at the top 10,000 customers worldwide, accounting for their price as well as their published product direction. While this is a limited and myopic view, many claim it is for the best, their reason being that network virtualization is only really needed by the very large networks. The more I think about this approach, the more I believe it is incorrect. Let us be frank here. Most networking today, within many different organizational sizes, is a hodgepodge of technologies designed to solve the same problem(s) over and over: how to get data quickly from point A to point B with minimum disruption to service.

HyTrust Expanding Role in Secure Hybrid Cloud

HyTrust released their version 3.5 of their virtualization security proxy and compliance tool. This tool is core to a growing ecosystem of partners and systems. HyTrust has also expanded its role within the Secure Hybrid Cloud by covering more of what is traditionally part of the data center. HyTrust is a proxy that sits between an administrator and sensitive systems by providing advanced role based access controls but also advanced logging. With HyTrust fronting your VMware vSphere environment, HP ILO, Cisco UCS UIM, Nexus Switches, administrators gain a fine grain level of control over actions, improved logging in these environments, and the ability to vault critical passwords.