The Lippis Report

Mixed vendor network environments increase complexity and complexity is not reliability’s best friend. In the following 3-minute Lippis Report podcast, Nick Lippis discusses network complexity and the disruptive outcomes it creates via two examples: the US Customs and Border Protection Agency at Los Angeles Airport and global Skype VoIP service.

The system that provides electricity transmission, commonly called the electrical grid, is under intense scrutiny to make it smarter. Today’s electrical grid was designed decades ago without optimization and information flow of electricity consumption beyond local utilities, leaving businesses, homeowners and utilities blind to how electricity is being consumed. The Smart Grid adds intelligence from energy source to consumption end- points so that businesses and homeowners can view their consumption and control their usage while utilities can better manage electricity demand and delivery. The building of the Smart Grid is an estimated market of $20 B/yr over the next five years with governments passing legislation, mandates and partial funding to build it. For perspective, Smart Grid networks have the potential to be much larger than the Internet! The building of highly scalable and secure IP networks is Cisco’s core competency, making them uniquely qualified to supply it. I talk with Inbar Lasser-Raab, Senior Director, Network Systems and Smart Grid Solutions at Cisco about Cisco’s Smart Grid.

Mixed vendor network environments increase complexity and complexity is not reliability’s best friend. In the following 3-minute Lippis Report podcast, Nick Lippis discusses network complexity and the disruptive outcomes it creates via two examples: the US Customs and Border Protection Agency at Los Angeles Airport and global Skype VoIP service.

The system that provides electricity transmission, commonly called the electrical grid is under intense scrutiny to make it smarter. Today’s electrical grid was designed decades ago without optimization and information flow of electricity consumption beyond local utilities, leaving businesses, homeowners and utilities blind to how electricity is being consumed. The Smart Grid adds intelligence from energy source to consumption end- points so that businesses and homeowners can view their consumption and control their usage while utilities can better manage electricity demand and delivery. The building of the Smart Grid is an estimated market of $20 B/yr over the next five years with governments passing legislation, mandates and partial funding to build it. For perspective, Smart Grid networks have the potential to be much larger than the Internet! The building of highly scalable and secure IP networks is Cisco’s core competency, making them uniquely qualified to supply it. I talk with Inbar Lasser-Raab, Senior Director, Network Systems and Smart Grid Solutions at Cisco about Cisco’s Smart Grid.

Mixed vendor network environments increase complexity and complexity is not reliability’s best friend. In the following 3-minute Lippis Report podcast, Nick Lippis discusses network complexity and the disruptive outcomes it creates via two examples; the US Customs and Border Protection Agency at Los Angeles Airport and global Skype VoIP service.

Unique is the operator of Zurich Airport and offers a broad service portfolio to about 180 other companies, which also reside in the airport. Zurich Airport offers work for about 20,000 individuals and transports approximately 18 million passengers annually. Airport applications like air-traffic control and tower communications demand the highest uptime and need to be separated from operations like baggage distribution, business administration, video surveillance, and public WLAN traffic. Peter Zopfi, head of Communication Engineering for Unique was confronted with building a network with tunable attributes that were as varied as the businesses that relied upon it. In this podcast Peter discusses what worked and what didn’t and how a LAN-based MPLS VPN Cisco Network Virtualization strategy was key to delivering business value to all businesses and operations at Zurich Airport. It’s a fascinating discussion that you don’t want to miss. Enjoy, Nick.

The word Gestalt means a structure or configuration of elements so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by the summation of its parts. IT can create greater security defenses by approaching security as an integrated system of its siloed security tools and appliances. The Gestalt approach is a way to make sure that every device is contributing to the security of the corporation by being able to share information and work collaboratively to defend against increasingly sophisticated exploits through increased visibility and control. The best example of the Gestalt approach is Cisco SAFE, a security architecture and framework to network existing security devices so they work in unison and thus deliver a higher level of IT defense. I talk with Bill McGee, of the Security Technology Marketing group at Cisco Systems about Cisco’s new SAFE security architecture.

Zeus Kerravala of Yankee joins me to discuss the many changes occurring in the industry including Nortel’s liquidation and Cisco’s huge influence over the industry as it reshapes to respond to its UCS and data center 3.0 initiatives. We discuss HP’s new relationships with MSFT and Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, Enterasys, Extreme, Force10, IBM, Juniper, and much more. We talk winners and losers and provide insight into the major trends that are focusing on new corporate IT buying behavior. Enjoy.

According to Frost and Sullivan’s July 2008 World Web Conferencing Services Forecast, the web collaboration market is expected to grow at 22.5% CAGR through 2013! That’s the good news. In larger organizations that use web conferencing for a mix of internal, external and a combination of sessions there is growing evidence that WAN bandwidth is being heavily consumed. To significantly reduce WAN bandwidth cost while Web conferencing load increases, Cisco has offered a hybrid model by introducing the WebEx Node for the ASR 1000. Tere’ Bracco, Senior Marketing Manager for Network Systems and Security at Cisco joins the program to discuss web conferencing trends and the new hybrid model for WebEx.

Along with a turbulent macro economic cycle comes business rationalization and in networking the wide area offers a unique opportunity to deliver value both in terms of operational efficiency and business initiative alignment. The branch WAN as been pieced together usually site by site without a comprehensive plan as branches are connected with inconsistent WAN Services. IT planners are being offered an opportunity to implement a common set of WAN Services embedded within routers such as UC, WAN optimization, security etc., which promise to lower operational spend, align business initiatives and policy while delivering Local Area Networks (LANs) like application performance over the WAN. Tere’ Bracco Senior Marketing Manager for Network Systems and Security at Cisco joins me to discuss Cisco’s new WAN Advantage initiative that delivers a common set of WAN Services between ASR and ISR routers.

There are over 1.5 billion people worldwide using the internet representing only 23.5 percent of world population and we are now entering an Internet population explosion as emerging internet countries go online and need address space. Experts predict that an IP address exhaustion date is coming between Nov 2010 and Feb 2011 or sooner as countries potentially rush to acquire the last available addresses to avoid being shut out of the internet. In addition the number of IP addresses per person is growing too as millions to billions of new devices have become IP aware such as Mobile internet IPhones, smart phones, etc plus new internet services on trains, plains and the home grow. So the question is, is the industry heading toward another Y2K event? Fred Wettling, a Bechtel Fellow plus Manager-of Architecture & Planning and coauthor of the book “Global IPv6 Strategies: From Business Analysis to Operational Planning” joins us to provide perspective and strategy on how IT leaders can manage IP addressing and avoid a Y2K event.

IT suppliers are delivering products that consume less energy while offering new IT delivery approaches such as data center virtualization to reduce cooling and power demands. Cisco Systems has taken a broader approach to energy management by delivering a power command and control architecture called Cisco EnergyWise which seeks to provide business and IT leaders with the tools to measure, manage and control the power consumption of all devices connected to the corporate network. Further, EnergyWise seeks to connect facility heating, air conditioning, lighting and other non-IT systems—systems that consume the largest proportion of corporate energy—in an effort to provide IT leaders with the tools and means to manage their overall energy consumption. Berna Devrim, Sr. Manager, Access Switching Marketing at Cisco Systems is my guest as we discuss Cisco’s EnergyWise initiative and what it means to business and IT leaders who seek to control energy consumption.

Marie Hattar, Vice President of Network Systems and Security Solution Marketing at Cisco Systems, is my guest as we discuss the sustainable effect afforded by networks and communications. Networking has always contributed to green initiatives by providing teleworking, collaboration, telepresence and other ways of organizing people and workflow independent of geographic location. But networking is now taking the role of power management and control for IT and non-IT systems offering one of the most powerful sustainability tools available. Find out how by listening to this podcast.

While the global economy slows down, network security spending continues to be robust as business and IT leaders seek to protect corporate assets, thus avoiding a major distraction when market focus is needed most. Recent analyst numbers suggest that data loss can result from myriad corporate security vulnerabilities. It’s getting harder to protect a company’s intellectual property as the modern concept of work is based upon anywhere and anytime electronic collaboration and the borderless enterprise. Nasrin Rezai, Senior Director of Information Security for Cisco Systems is my guest as we discuss PPT or People, Process and Technology as the strategy to mitigate data from being lost or stolen from your company.

To understand best practices of data loss prevention, you need to listen to this podcast.