The Lippis Report

April 19th, 2010

During a podcast with Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group, we came to the conclusion that the unified communications market is in a funk and the only way out is for suppliers to adhere to industry standards that allow interoperability. To demonstrate this achievement, UC providers would be well advised to participate in industry wide interoperability testing. In this Lippis Report, we discuss the issues that are holding back UC and video conferencing adoption.

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April 19th, 2010

By Cisco Systems

The last decade has witnessed a rapid development of data and voice convergence over a common IP infrastructure. Now video is converging with data and voice traffic over a common IP network. Converging video with data and voice is more complex than converging data and voice: it demands more considerations, and it imposes stricter requirements on the underlying IP network. This paper reviews high-level requirements of a media-ready network and presents a high-level framework and systematic methodology to perform Medianet Readiness Assessment (MRA) on your enterprise network. It goes into detail on the methodology and process it takes to perform the assessment.

Find out how by downloading this paper

April 19th, 2010

By Voltaire

This paper describes the challenges inherent in existing Ethernet solutions and how Voltaire’s new scale-out Ethernet architecture effectively addresses those challenges. Voltaire’s InfiniBand products and fabric management solutions have been addressing Data center architecture changes for years. Today, Voltaire delivers the fabric for the world’s largest supercomputers, the world’s fastest financial trading platforms, and the world’s most scalable database machines. Soon, Voltaire will extend its product offering to include Converged Enhanced Ethernet CEE switches and software, allowing end users with less demanding performance requirements to benefit from a far more scalable Ethernet fabric that also lowers overall fabric costs, lowers power consumption, has greater efficiencies, and simplifies management.

Find out how by downloading this white paper.

April 19th, 2010

By Forrester

History shows that small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) suffer less and recover faster from recessions than their large enterprise counterparts. This recession will prove to be no different. However, the small businesses that help catalyze the recovery this time around will be started by tech-savvy professionals who start their businesses with technology investments and a Millennial workforce that has grown up on mobile phones and social networks. Technology vendors that tap the emerging tech- savvy small-business market will come out of this recession much faster than those that follow historical patterns of relying mainly on spotty spending by large enterprise customers.

Find out how by downloading this paper.

April 19th, 2010

Networks today require predictable performance and are much more aware of application flows than traditional networks with static addressing of devices. Enterprise networks in the past were designed for specific applications while new cloud designs in the data center can address a multitude of applications. This is clearly a radical departure from today’s oversubscribed networks in which delays and high transit latency are inherent.

To learn more, download the Arista Networks whitepaper.

April 19th, 2010

By 3Com

The industry is a buzz around Ethernet’s emergence as the unifying data center network fabric of choice.  Although 10GigE is very attractive as a unifying fabric — prices are dropping and adoption is rising — we’re still a long way from a unifying fabric in the data center. According to Nemertes, nearly 63% of organizations have no plans for network storage over 10GigE, while 71% have no plan yet to converge data center switching fabrics into one unified fabric. Standards organizations are still working to address the key challenges of latency, loss, and performance at scale, which are required to ensure that a converged infrastructure performs effectively for all data center applications.   For most organizations, the best approach may be evolutionary – one in which converging parts of the network such as access layer (in-the-rack) help address server/storage I/O complexity with higher performance 10GigE Converged Network Adaptors (CNAs) – makes good sense in the near term. As the enterprise needs for agility and lowered TCO converge with standards-based resilience and reliability, we will eventually arrive at the “data center over Ethernet” (DCoE).
To learn more, download the 3Com whitepaper.

April 19th, 2010

Arista’s new 7500 Series of Ethernet switches is touted as the fastest Ethernet switch on the planet. Arista Networks has been delivering ultra high performance fixed 1/10 Gb Ethernet switches for high performance computing and cloud computing data centers. But this week Arista shocked the industry by introducing a massively powerful Ethernet switch platform that is 10 GbE port dense, compact, cloud spec fast, amazingly green plus smart and prepared for 40 and 100GbE with a price tag 50% below competitive offerings. I talk with Douglas Gourlay, Vice President Marketing and Anshul Sadana Vice President, Customer & Systems Engineering both from Arista Networks about a new age of network design in the cloud-computing era.

April 18th, 2010

This is the question that Zeus Kerravala, SVP of the Yankee Group and I address in the Lippis Report podcast. Here’s a hint, lack of standards and the vendor community’s lack of interest of embracing the ones we have. Post your ideas on twitter with the following hash mark #UCINTEROP.

April 13th, 2010

Power over Ethernet (PoE) powers IT endpoints like IP phones and WLAN Access points. But newer devices like IP video phones, IP surveillance cameras, thin client display, next Generation IP phones, 802.11n WLAN access points and Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) Surveillance cameras require more than 15W of power so the IEEE recently standardized a new 30W PoE standard called PoE Plus. Soon most, if not all, corporations will have a mix of end points that require old PoE and new PoE plus power. IT leaders can meet these requirements by leveraging the enhanced PoE and PoE Plus features offered by Cisco’s Catalyst 4500 E-Series product line. Moreover Cisco has announced two new Catalyst 4500 Series Line Cards with readiness for PoE Plus and inline power up to 30W per port. I talk with Sachin Gupta, Director and Product Manager at Cisco Systems about these new PoE design features and what new options are available to IT architects as they build out corporate collaborative solutions.

April 5th, 2010

Many IT leaders are striving to understand who is on their network and what they are doing. These are two simple questions and yet, in many cases, IT business leaders do not have a good way to answer them. And once IT leaders are able to obtain this information the question then becomes what else I can do with the data: obtain a history report, perform statistics for analysis and planning, generate compliance reports and much more. To tightly link business processes with networked applications, IT leaders need to wrap policy, identity and security around users and IT assets.

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April 5th, 2010

By Avaya

Internet and Corporate Video has become mainstream. The implications of video for your business are clear: customers, employees, and business partners accept video as a tool, and expect video as a form of communication. Real-time video collaboration in your business can tap into this growing trend, increase team effectiveness, reduce decision cycles, enhance relationship building, and of course, diminish travel costs while limiting your organization’s carbon footprint.

Find out how by downloading this white paper.

April 5th, 2010

By Arista Networks

What is Arista’s definition of scalability of a data center network? What are the critical requirements and what issues must be solved to address data center scalability? Scalability of the data center network is the ability for network technologies to accept increased traffic or new devices without impacting the contribution margin. In this white paper Arista Networks discuses network design best practices for scaling up Data Center Networks.

Find out how by downloading this paper.

April 5th, 2010

By Farpoint Group

Unified Networking is identified as one of the most important trends in enterprise networks, specifically, the eventual merger of wired and wireless LANs into simply the LAN. This tight integration of the wired and wireless LAN through integrated hardware, common operating system and unified management delivers compelling benefits to the enterprise, including lower TCO (Capex and Opex) through the elimination of redundant infrastructure, operational efficiency in the forms of increased uptime, visibility and improved security and finally a reduction in network administration, education and training costs.

To learn more, download the 3Com whitepaper.

April 5th, 2010

A panel of IT business leaders discusses their experience with Network Virtualization as we dive into motivations, design options, economics and business outcomes. On the panel is Marilyn Hay, Manager of the Network Management Centre at the University of British Columbia, Frank Hoonhout, Senior Lead Network Engineer at the State of Oregon’s State Data Center and Hasan Siraj, Director of Product Marketing at Cisco Systems. This is a podcast you surely want to listen to.

Find out the real world value and business outcome of investing in Network Virtualization by listening to this podcast.