Customer Name:
Tele Sistemi Ferroviari
Industry: Technology
Location: Rome, Italy
Company size: 700 employees
Outsourcing Provider Transforms Business Model
Italian ICT company TSF adopts Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision to create new, on-demand cloud services
GTS Group built a fully virtualized data center using VMware technologies like vSphere, vCenter, and vCloud Director. This allows GTS to provide virtual hosting services for businesses in a flexible and cost efficient way. Customers benefit from reduced costs, increased performance and reliability, and the ability to scale resources without new investments. GTS handles all infrastructure maintenance so customers can focus on their main priorities. The virtual environment offers high security, flexibility, and transparency around where customer data is stored.
A business case I developed for BroadSoft, to support their prospects' investment decision for Hosted Unified Communications.
This executive-level report demonstrates the business case for investing in Hosted UC services to serve the SMB market. The case proved pivotal in helping numerous service providers understand the emerging opportunity and add UC to their service offer.
Thinking of innovation in a tough economy? Read more and learn about the benefits of utilizing Open Source, Cloud Computing and Engineering Automation.
4-page success story describes how private health insurer HBF selected Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform to deliver a seamless user experience when transitioning from physical to virtual desktops and for performance tiering and dynamic pooling efficiencies.
For more information on Virtual Storage Platform please visit: http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-virtual-storage-platform.html?WT.ac=us_mg_pro_hvsp
G2iX CIO Forum - Updated CIO Innovation Toolkitg2ix
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This forum focuses on the CIO Toolkit: Open Source, Cloud Computing, and Software Automation. These are exciting innovative technologies that are worth paying attention to and are poised to transform the way organizations get services and capabilities to market. Find out how you can enable improved business performance for your company today.
Confronting the Data Center Crisis: A Cost - Benefit Analysis of the IBM Computing on Demand (CoD) Cloud Offering
Reducing TCO and Enabling New Capability, Faster Time to Results,
and New Business Models
The IBM zEnterprise platform delivers an integrated approach that reaches across platforms to provide intelligent support on a single system for business applications such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and industry-specific core applications
In this whitepaper, we will look at multiple case studies that demonstrate how Smarter Computing delivers improved IT economics. The case studies cover different IT domainsâ
optimized systems, federated data, Cloud and new service delivery models.
GTS Group built a fully virtualized data center using VMware technologies like vSphere, vCenter, and vCloud Director. This allows GTS to provide virtual hosting services for businesses in a flexible and cost efficient way. Customers benefit from reduced costs, increased performance and reliability, and the ability to scale resources without new investments. GTS handles all infrastructure maintenance so customers can focus on their main priorities. The virtual environment offers high security, flexibility, and transparency around where customer data is stored.
A business case I developed for BroadSoft, to support their prospects' investment decision for Hosted Unified Communications.
This executive-level report demonstrates the business case for investing in Hosted UC services to serve the SMB market. The case proved pivotal in helping numerous service providers understand the emerging opportunity and add UC to their service offer.
Thinking of innovation in a tough economy? Read more and learn about the benefits of utilizing Open Source, Cloud Computing and Engineering Automation.
4-page success story describes how private health insurer HBF selected Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform to deliver a seamless user experience when transitioning from physical to virtual desktops and for performance tiering and dynamic pooling efficiencies.
For more information on Virtual Storage Platform please visit: http://www.hds.com/products/storage-systems/hitachi-virtual-storage-platform.html?WT.ac=us_mg_pro_hvsp
G2iX CIO Forum - Updated CIO Innovation Toolkitg2ix
Â
This forum focuses on the CIO Toolkit: Open Source, Cloud Computing, and Software Automation. These are exciting innovative technologies that are worth paying attention to and are poised to transform the way organizations get services and capabilities to market. Find out how you can enable improved business performance for your company today.
Confronting the Data Center Crisis: A Cost - Benefit Analysis of the IBM Computing on Demand (CoD) Cloud Offering
Reducing TCO and Enabling New Capability, Faster Time to Results,
and New Business Models
The IBM zEnterprise platform delivers an integrated approach that reaches across platforms to provide intelligent support on a single system for business applications such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and industry-specific core applications
In this whitepaper, we will look at multiple case studies that demonstrate how Smarter Computing delivers improved IT economics. The case studies cover different IT domainsâ
optimized systems, federated data, Cloud and new service delivery models.
The document discusses the state of IT in enterprises prior to cloud adoption, challenges faced, and drivers for cloud adoption. It defines cloud computing and outlines principles and risks. The document provides a 10 step process for moving to the cloud, including determining the appropriate cloud model, assessing applications, selecting vendors, and defining a cloud strategy. Finally, it emphasizes communicating the benefits and risks of cloud to stakeholders.
1. 1-Net Singapore launched a new virtual hosting service called Virtual@1-Net using the HSPcomplete solution from SWsoft to allow small businesses affordable access to virtual private servers without requiring them to own hardware.
2. The service is run on a cluster of Dell servers including a PowerEdge 8450 data center server and three PowerEdge 1550 rack servers with a Dell storage subsystem.
3. The basic Virtual@1-Net plan costs only $15 per month and automatically provisions a virtual server for customers within minutes of signing up and paying, allowing them to load their website and applications.
Cloud Computing is a model that provides convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources like networks, servers, storage, applications and services. These resources can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort. Cloud services are typically categorized as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud computing provides benefits like reduced costs, increased flexibility and scalability, but some organizations have needs that require a hybrid cloud or dedicated hosting approach for security, customization or reliability needs.
The document discusses Avaya's data networking solutions and provides information about its products and capabilities. It summarizes that Avaya offers reliable, scalable, and efficient networking solutions to address businesses' needs around always-on availability, cost management, and adapting to data growth. It highlights several of Avaya's switch and routing platforms and how they deliver benefits like reduced complexity, energy efficiency, and investment protection.
This paper will discuss how cloud is helping enterprises, governments and industries around the globe meet their current challenges through key value drivers.
Cloud computing -- a technology that âenables on-demand utilization of a shared, infinite amount of compute resources or computing power via the Internetâ -- is fast becoming mainstream.
âCost savings, reduced time to market, and rapid ROI -- these are three key factors that IT and business executives alike cite when asked about the value of cloud computing,â says Winston Damarillo, chief executive officer for G2iX, in reference to the results of the discussions among CIOs and CTOs of global enterprises located in Manila and Cebu.
This white paper discusses the concept of "Carrier Cloud" and the opportunities it presents for telecommunications carriers. The three pillars of Carrier Cloud are being carrier-centric, able to deliver carrier-grade cloud services, and providing differentiation through IT and network innovation. Carriers can capture new revenue streams by positioning themselves in key value chains like business IT using their cloud. Carriers have advantages over other cloud providers through their networks, commercial maturity, datacenter infrastructure, and ability to ensure high service availability. The paper argues Carriers should pursue cloud services as a strategic opportunity.
Oracle Systems _ Kevin Mcisaac _ The IT Landscape has changes - have you_.pdfInSync2011
Â
The document discusses how the IT landscape has changed due to trends like Moore's Law, server virtualization, cloud computing, and the evolution of integrated systems. It suggests these "mega trends" are driving infrastructure towards more integrated solutions from single vendors, rather than best-of-breed components from multiple vendors. While integrated systems may offer benefits like faster time to solution and lower risk, barriers to moving from existing heterogeneous environments include issues like application compatibility, existing infrastructure investments, and re-engineering processes.
The document discusses trends in big data and data management. It notes that data volume, velocity, variety, and value are increasing dramatically. This rapid growth is challenging IT to manage and analyze more complex data relationships in real time and at large scale. The document also discusses how new consumption models like cloud computing and storage virtualization can help reduce costs and better manage the explosion of data replication. It introduces Hitachi's accelerated flash storage and new HUS VM entry-level enterprise storage system to address these big data challenges.
Telecoms' Regulatory Accounting Separation and Oman Case Studyssimam
Â
Accounting separation is being implemented in Oman to regulate the telecom market. It requires dominant operators like Omantel to prepare separate financial statements for different business lines to increase transparency around costs, revenues, and internal transactions. This aims to prevent anti-competitive behavior by ensuring non-discriminatory treatment of competitors. Oman's telecom regulator TRA specifies parameters for the cost accounting model and uses results from regulatory accounting to conduct tests around margin squeeze, predatory pricing, and cross-subsidization. The Oman model provides a framework for implementing accounting separation as a regulatory tool.
The PTP 100 Series from Cambium Networks provides the lowest cost of entry for high-quality wireless broadband using point-to-point technology. It offers a simple and affordable way to upgrade networks through software keys that increase throughput. The PTP 100 Series delivers exceptional performance and reliability with flexible upgrade options to support network and business growth over time.
CIBER Managed Services GmbH built a dynamic Cloud Infrastructure for SAP landscapes, based on a combination of IBM server, storage, database, and system management software. The new storage infrastructure, which consists of the IBM XIV Storage System and IBM SAN Volume Controller, offers individual service classes to suit different customer needs, maximizing operational efficiency and minimizing expenses. The SAP application landscapes run on both IBM Power Systems servers and IBM System x Blade Server technologies.
Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.
This white paper discusses the challenges of maintaining an internal fax infrastructure and argues that cloud-based fax services provide a lower-cost alternative. It notes that maintaining internal fax servers is costly, requiring significant spending on hardware, software, support personnel, and telecom providers globally. As IT budgets are cut, companies are reconsidering these costs. The paper predicts that the market for internet fax services will double from $750 million in 2008 to $1.5 billion by 2013 as more enterprises outsource fax to cloud providers and save money.
The white paper discusses the benefits of moving from an internal fax infrastructure to a cloud-based fax service model. It notes that maintaining an internal fax server infrastructure is costly, requiring investments in hardware, software, support personnel, and regional telecom providers. For global enterprises, an internal model adds complexity and expense. Meanwhile, cloud fax services provide the same level of quality and control at lower costs through economies of scale. The paper outlines five key benefits of cloud fax services, including dramatic cost reductions, a simplified infrastructure, platform agnosticism, flexible integration capabilities, and access to more extensive services. It also explains how cloud fax services address challenges like managing a global infrastructure, ensuring security and compliance,
IBM is promoting cloud computing and its cloud offerings as ways for vendors to generate recurring revenue through subscriptions and for customers to reduce upfront costs, increase flexibility, and improve efficiency. IBM provides private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions using its Power Systems, System z, and System x hardware and software. Key benefits of IBM's cloud infrastructure include security, reliability, scalability, and workload optimization.
IP Office is a communications system from Avaya designed for small to medium sized businesses. It unifies communications across devices and locations. IP Office adapts to business needs and budgets while providing individual productivity tools. It aims to help businesses use communications to grow sales and lower costs, making Avaya a leader in business communications.
This whitepaper discusses how cloud adoption provides benefits beyond just financial return on investment (ROI). Moving to the cloud allows IT teams to focus less on managing infrastructure and more on innovation and strategic initiatives that can improve business operations. The cloud enables quicker application delivery and increased employee productivity, leading to greater business agility and competitive advantage over time. While cost savings are important, cloud computing allows for continuous business transformation through new ideas implemented by a more creative IT organization.
The document discusses the state of IT in enterprises prior to cloud adoption, challenges faced, and drivers for cloud adoption. It defines cloud computing and outlines principles and risks. The document provides a 10 step process for moving to the cloud, including determining the appropriate cloud model, assessing applications, selecting vendors, and defining a cloud strategy. Finally, it emphasizes communicating the benefits and risks of cloud to stakeholders.
1. 1-Net Singapore launched a new virtual hosting service called Virtual@1-Net using the HSPcomplete solution from SWsoft to allow small businesses affordable access to virtual private servers without requiring them to own hardware.
2. The service is run on a cluster of Dell servers including a PowerEdge 8450 data center server and three PowerEdge 1550 rack servers with a Dell storage subsystem.
3. The basic Virtual@1-Net plan costs only $15 per month and automatically provisions a virtual server for customers within minutes of signing up and paying, allowing them to load their website and applications.
Cloud Computing is a model that provides convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources like networks, servers, storage, applications and services. These resources can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort. Cloud services are typically categorized as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud computing provides benefits like reduced costs, increased flexibility and scalability, but some organizations have needs that require a hybrid cloud or dedicated hosting approach for security, customization or reliability needs.
The document discusses Avaya's data networking solutions and provides information about its products and capabilities. It summarizes that Avaya offers reliable, scalable, and efficient networking solutions to address businesses' needs around always-on availability, cost management, and adapting to data growth. It highlights several of Avaya's switch and routing platforms and how they deliver benefits like reduced complexity, energy efficiency, and investment protection.
This paper will discuss how cloud is helping enterprises, governments and industries around the globe meet their current challenges through key value drivers.
Cloud computing -- a technology that âenables on-demand utilization of a shared, infinite amount of compute resources or computing power via the Internetâ -- is fast becoming mainstream.
âCost savings, reduced time to market, and rapid ROI -- these are three key factors that IT and business executives alike cite when asked about the value of cloud computing,â says Winston Damarillo, chief executive officer for G2iX, in reference to the results of the discussions among CIOs and CTOs of global enterprises located in Manila and Cebu.
This white paper discusses the concept of "Carrier Cloud" and the opportunities it presents for telecommunications carriers. The three pillars of Carrier Cloud are being carrier-centric, able to deliver carrier-grade cloud services, and providing differentiation through IT and network innovation. Carriers can capture new revenue streams by positioning themselves in key value chains like business IT using their cloud. Carriers have advantages over other cloud providers through their networks, commercial maturity, datacenter infrastructure, and ability to ensure high service availability. The paper argues Carriers should pursue cloud services as a strategic opportunity.
Oracle Systems _ Kevin Mcisaac _ The IT Landscape has changes - have you_.pdfInSync2011
Â
The document discusses how the IT landscape has changed due to trends like Moore's Law, server virtualization, cloud computing, and the evolution of integrated systems. It suggests these "mega trends" are driving infrastructure towards more integrated solutions from single vendors, rather than best-of-breed components from multiple vendors. While integrated systems may offer benefits like faster time to solution and lower risk, barriers to moving from existing heterogeneous environments include issues like application compatibility, existing infrastructure investments, and re-engineering processes.
The document discusses trends in big data and data management. It notes that data volume, velocity, variety, and value are increasing dramatically. This rapid growth is challenging IT to manage and analyze more complex data relationships in real time and at large scale. The document also discusses how new consumption models like cloud computing and storage virtualization can help reduce costs and better manage the explosion of data replication. It introduces Hitachi's accelerated flash storage and new HUS VM entry-level enterprise storage system to address these big data challenges.
Telecoms' Regulatory Accounting Separation and Oman Case Studyssimam
Â
Accounting separation is being implemented in Oman to regulate the telecom market. It requires dominant operators like Omantel to prepare separate financial statements for different business lines to increase transparency around costs, revenues, and internal transactions. This aims to prevent anti-competitive behavior by ensuring non-discriminatory treatment of competitors. Oman's telecom regulator TRA specifies parameters for the cost accounting model and uses results from regulatory accounting to conduct tests around margin squeeze, predatory pricing, and cross-subsidization. The Oman model provides a framework for implementing accounting separation as a regulatory tool.
The PTP 100 Series from Cambium Networks provides the lowest cost of entry for high-quality wireless broadband using point-to-point technology. It offers a simple and affordable way to upgrade networks through software keys that increase throughput. The PTP 100 Series delivers exceptional performance and reliability with flexible upgrade options to support network and business growth over time.
CIBER Managed Services GmbH built a dynamic Cloud Infrastructure for SAP landscapes, based on a combination of IBM server, storage, database, and system management software. The new storage infrastructure, which consists of the IBM XIV Storage System and IBM SAN Volume Controller, offers individual service classes to suit different customer needs, maximizing operational efficiency and minimizing expenses. The SAP application landscapes run on both IBM Power Systems servers and IBM System x Blade Server technologies.
Visit http://bit.ly/KWh5Dx to 'Follow' the official Twitter handle of IBM India Smarter Computing.
This white paper discusses the challenges of maintaining an internal fax infrastructure and argues that cloud-based fax services provide a lower-cost alternative. It notes that maintaining internal fax servers is costly, requiring significant spending on hardware, software, support personnel, and telecom providers globally. As IT budgets are cut, companies are reconsidering these costs. The paper predicts that the market for internet fax services will double from $750 million in 2008 to $1.5 billion by 2013 as more enterprises outsource fax to cloud providers and save money.
The white paper discusses the benefits of moving from an internal fax infrastructure to a cloud-based fax service model. It notes that maintaining an internal fax server infrastructure is costly, requiring investments in hardware, software, support personnel, and regional telecom providers. For global enterprises, an internal model adds complexity and expense. Meanwhile, cloud fax services provide the same level of quality and control at lower costs through economies of scale. The paper outlines five key benefits of cloud fax services, including dramatic cost reductions, a simplified infrastructure, platform agnosticism, flexible integration capabilities, and access to more extensive services. It also explains how cloud fax services address challenges like managing a global infrastructure, ensuring security and compliance,
IBM is promoting cloud computing and its cloud offerings as ways for vendors to generate recurring revenue through subscriptions and for customers to reduce upfront costs, increase flexibility, and improve efficiency. IBM provides private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions using its Power Systems, System z, and System x hardware and software. Key benefits of IBM's cloud infrastructure include security, reliability, scalability, and workload optimization.
IP Office is a communications system from Avaya designed for small to medium sized businesses. It unifies communications across devices and locations. IP Office adapts to business needs and budgets while providing individual productivity tools. It aims to help businesses use communications to grow sales and lower costs, making Avaya a leader in business communications.
This whitepaper discusses how cloud adoption provides benefits beyond just financial return on investment (ROI). Moving to the cloud allows IT teams to focus less on managing infrastructure and more on innovation and strategic initiatives that can improve business operations. The cloud enables quicker application delivery and increased employee productivity, leading to greater business agility and competitive advantage over time. While cost savings are important, cloud computing allows for continuous business transformation through new ideas implemented by a more creative IT organization.
The document summarizes an IDC white paper on converged infrastructure. The key points are:
1) IT infrastructure has become highly complex over time, leading to rising management costs as organizations have had to integrate different systems. Server virtualization has helped contain hardware costs but not management overhead.
2) Converged infrastructure integrates servers, storage, networking and management tools into a single system. This simplifies deployment and lowers management costs through automation.
3) Converged systems represent the natural evolution of IT infrastructure as different technologies gradually integrate over multiple technology cycles. Convergence enables more dynamic, efficient "private cloud" environments within organizations.
Tiger Brands implemented a Cisco networking solution including 10GbE switches, CAT6 cabling, and Cisco WAAS devices to optimize bandwidth. This standardized, scalable infrastructure reduced risks and costs, improved employee productivity, and allowed for integration of new technologies and acquisitions. Cisco WAAS enabled Active Directory services across 90 sites, reducing server costs by 80%. The new platform delivers business value through improved efficiencies and a competitive advantage.
This white paper discusses how cloud computing can drive value for enterprises by lowering IT costs and enabling innovation. Some key points:
1) Cloud computing provides on-demand, scalable access to computing resources and enables a pay-per-use model that can significantly lower both capital and operating costs for IT compared to maintaining physical infrastructure.
2) Standardizing applications and infrastructure on cloud platforms further drives down costs through improved efficiency and reduced complexity.
3) In addition to cost savings, cloud also allows organizations to innovate faster, access new markets more easily, and optimize existing IT investments through an elastic, globally available environment.
Cloud computing provides several key business benefits:
1) It lowers IT costs by increasing infrastructure utilization and automation.
2) It enables access to IT resources and applications on a flexible, "pay-as-you-go" basis.
3) It simplifies IT for end users by removing complexity and allowing access from any device.
Cloud adoption strategies vary depending on a company's size and industry dynamics, but cloud pilots can help organizations understand how cloud may address their business needs in a low-risk way.
This document provides an executive briefing on how telecommunications companies can translate new capabilities enabled by network functions virtualization (NFV), software defined networking (SDN), and distributed compute into new revenue growth. It defines the concept of "Telco Cloud" as the adoption of virtualization technologies and cloud business practices. The briefing estimates that a converged telco operator could potentially increase revenues by 10.5% by 2021 by launching new network-integrated services enabled by Telco Cloud, with the majority of new revenue coming from connectivity services and new digital services.
The Cloud Computing model is replacing the traditional IT model for many organizations that have not been able to keep up with the tremendous rate at which technology is changing, the challenges of disparate IT systems inherited through acquisitions and mergers, and decreasing internal resources available for IT commitment.
Cloud Computing models range from public cloud services that bill companies for access to IT infrastructure; the private cloud provider that hosts resources for the sole use of its own organization; dedicated external hosting to non-shared resources; and hybrid hosting, a mixed solution of cloud computing and dedicated hosting.
Schneider Electric consulting experts use their Cloud Assessment Checklist to help potential clients identify the computer services needs that best meet their IT challenges. It is not uncommon to find that an organization would optimize operation with a hybrid hosting solution in which a secure, single-tenant database would be stored with a dedicated host and the front-end would be hosted in the public cloud. Similarly, cloud bursting functionality enables the organization to automatically deploy new applications within the public cloud as needed. Such hybrid hosting models allow scaling capability to accommodate an increase in the number of users in the organization and meet peak traffic demand.
Careful examination of business and security characteristics can determine the proper cloud and hosting model that meets the needs of any particular enterprise and, as a result, help increase the organizationâs IT capabilities and productivity while adding value to the business.
Container ecosystem based PaaS solution for Telco Cloud Analysis and ProposalKrishna-Kumar
Â
This document discusses the growing adoption of container-based platforms as a service (PaaS) solutions in the telecommunications industry. It notes that traditional virtual machine-based network function virtualization and software defined networking solutions are facing scalability issues. Container technologies are poised to help telcos deploy network functions and applications more efficiently at scale. The document proposes a container-based telco app orchestration mechanism using Apache Mesos to deploy containers adhering to quality of service requirements. Overall, the shift to container-based approaches can help telcos overcome limitations of current virtualization methods and better optimize resource utilization.
Cloud transformation enabling through tsg service lifecycle tool by helmuth z...Khazret Sapenov
Â
The document discusses TSG, a company that provides a service and sourcing lifecycle management platform. The platform helps companies design, plan, build, and manage their IT services. It provides features like a service catalog, pricing models, sourcing management, and contract management. The goal is to help companies transform their IT services, increase cost transparency, and better manage the full lifecycle of their services. TSG operates globally and has customers across many industries.
Executive Summary
CUSTOMER
AT&T
INDUSTRY
Service Provider
Challen ges
⢠Inability to scale quickly during ramp-up
⢠Subject-matter expertise concentrated in a few individuals
⢠Salesforce weak in vertical industry expertise
SOLUTIONS
⢠Value-case process
⢠Sales-decision toolset
⢠Training
Resu lts
⢠Pipeline qualification up by 50 percent
⢠Doubled sales output within first three months
⢠On track to double sales productivity
Netmagic solutions, leading IT Managed service provider with Data centers & Cloud Computing in India fulfills your entire IT infrastructure requirements: from collocation services to dedicated hosting, diaster recovery & data Storage solutions.
The 2012 EMC Corporation IT Performance Report EMC
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For a peek into EMCâs own IT Transformation, IT as a Service, Big Data and to providing our users with consumer-grade experiences, read the 2012 EMC Corporation IT Performance Report.
This jointly authored white paper examines how organizations are confronting
the challenges of integrating cloud-based services into a traditional managed
services model. General considerations around industry- and company specific
objectives are outlined, and case studies are used to illustrate a range
of scenarios, strategies and benefits achieved.
InTouch developed a pioneering high-scale VPN service based on Cisco's LISP solution to drive growth, increase customer satisfaction while reducing costs. The LISP architecture simplified their infrastructure, provided easier service integration and allowed customers to reuse existing IT assets. This resulted in savings of at least 30% in capital expenses and 50% in operating costs for InTouch along with greater flexibility and value for customers.
Business Case on Leveraging convergence within IT, to simplify technology management, save costs and automate the delivery of services to business users
Physical security and IT security: at Expo Milan
2015 the protection of people, resources, data
and devices was a key factor in the success of the
event. From video surveillance to the prevention
of cyber attacks, Ciscoâs IP network, the pervasive
multilevel security and a task force dedicated to
monitoring the entire infrastructure allowed the
organizers to concentrate on operational tasks
knowing that the event was in safe hands.
Sicurezza fisica e security informatica: a Expo
Milano 2015 la protezione di persone, risorse, dati
e dispositivi è stata un fattore chiave per la riuscita
della manifestazione. Dalla video-sorveglianza alla
prevenzione degli attacchi alla componente digitale,
la rete IP Cisco, la sicurezza pervasiva e multilivello
e una task force dedicata al monitoraggio dellâintera
infrastruttura hanno consentito agli organizzatori
di dedicarsi agli aspetti operativi potendo contare
sullâincolumitĂ dellâevento.
Business growth saw Seeberger needing a
new warehouse. But not just any warehouse.
Blended CiscoÂŽ Internet of Everything (IoE)
innovation now feed state-of-the-art storage
and production processes.
Neotel is South Africaâs first converged telecommunications network operator, providing business, wholesale, and consumer voice and data services. Cisco Smart Net Total CareTM provides Neotel with proactive support to optimise and secure the network, solving problems faster, improving operational efficiency, and reducing the risk of downtime.âSmart Net Total Care has proactively supported, optimised, and secured our network performance, allowing us to pay more attention to the running of our business.â
â Chala Rao, Chief Network Officer, Neotel
Il Gruppo Marcegaglia conferma una strategia di
sicurezza IT basata su soluzioni Cisco che va dagli
strumenti di firewall al sistema di Next-Generation
Intrusion Prevention System passando per la
gestione centralizzata.
The Marcegaglia Group confirms an IT security
strategy based on Cisco solutions with the
acquisition of centrally managed firewall tools
and a Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System.
Creating classrooms without boundaries. Egyptian institution sought academic excellence, mastering the Internet of Everything held the key. We innovated hyperconnected learning.
â Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport
has a vital role in transforming Egypt and the Arab World towards
tomorrowâs knowledge economy. We need to educate, open the
door to innovation, and deliver better education and research
quality in a rapid-changing knowledge world.â
Dr. Ismail Abdel Ghafar, President of the Arab Academy for Science,
Technology and Maritime Transport
Universal Motors Agencies (UMA), one of the largest General Motors dealers in Saudi Arabia, needed to improve communication between its 22 showrooms and 69 sites to better serve customers and reduce costs. UMA implemented a Cisco collaboration solution including networking infrastructure, voice, video, and contact center applications. This unified employees, improved responsiveness to customers, and reduced IT costs by 30% while increasing productivity by 10% and employee satisfaction by 20%.
ScanPlus is a leading European provider of managed cloud services with over 140 employees and 500 customers. It operates data centers in Germany and Switzerland linked by a Europe-wide IP backbone. ScanPlus provides a portfolio of cloud services tailored for medium-sized enterprises using Cisco technology, which helps make operations simpler, better protected, and easier to scale. Their cloud platform powered by Cisco has achieved high availability, scalability, and easier administration allowing the company to grow without problems and focus on creating new services.
Odeabank implemented a Cisco collaboration platform including Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise to transform their customer experience. This allowed contact center agents to communicate with customers via multiple channels while also collaborating with colleagues. As a result, staff turnover in the contact center is below market average. The technology has helped Odeabank grow rapidly since launching in 2012 and be named the Most Innovative Bank in Turkey.
IBB Energie AG provides electricity, gas, water, and communication services to customers in Switzerland. To stay competitive in a changing market, IBB upgraded its data centers with a Cisco FlexPod solution to improve application performance, reduce costs, and allow services to be deployed 30% faster. The new infrastructure enables IBB to respond more quickly to changing customer demands.
Schmitz Cargobull is a large manufacturer of trailers and semi-trailers in Europe. Their previous wireless network was no longer capable of supporting their production needs, slowing down processes. They implemented Cisco Outdoor Wireless Mesh to provide 100% wireless coverage across their main production site, improving connectivity of mobile devices, applications, and the production chain. This increased efficiency of logistic processes by 50% and improved business process quality, enhancing customer service and reducing costs.
Mankiewicz Gebr & Co wanted to renew its SAP infrastructure to improve performance and scalability issues. It virtualized its SAP system and database using a VMware vSphere platform spanning two EMC VNX storage-based data centers with Cisco UCS Blade Servers. This new highly available configuration runs SAP 20% faster, supports scaling beyond 1.4TB databases, and allows true 24/7 operations with improved weekend access for global users.
The town of Lomma Kommun in Sweden needed to upgrade its unreliable and unsecure network to better support growing demand for public services. It implemented a new Cisco Wi-Fi network with 360 access points and Cisco ISE for secure authentication across all buildings including 30 schools and care centers. This allows staff and students to access resources anywhere on campus, saves staff time by not needing to log in and out, and provides free guest Wi-Fi for tourists. The new secure network solution has halved IT costs and freed staff to develop new services for citizens.
Skipton Building Society's aging IT infrastructure was hindering its ability to support the growing business demands, slowing responsiveness. A Cisco Domain Ten workshop assessed IT processes and priorities and developed a customized roadmap for IT transformation. Implementing Cisco UCS Blade Servers and virtualizing servers reduced provisioning time from 4 weeks to less than 1 day. The new agile infrastructure better supports Skipton's competitive application development and ability to adapt to changing business needs.
Cisco Nexus 9000 Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
Invested in proof of concept to show operational efficiency
Customer ACI deployment going live in February 2015
Connector Corner: Seamlessly power UiPath Apps, GenAI with prebuilt connectorsDianaGray10
Â
Join us to learn how UiPath Apps can directly and easily interact with prebuilt connectors via Integration Service--including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Open GenAI, and more.
The best part is you can achieve this without building a custom workflow! Say goodbye to the hassle of using separate automations to call APIs. By seamlessly integrating within App Studio, you can now easily streamline your workflow, while gaining direct access to our Connector Catalog of popular applications.
Weâll discuss and demo the benefits of UiPath Apps and connectors including:
Creating a compelling user experience for any software, without the limitations of APIs.
Accelerating the app creation process, saving time and effort
Enjoying high-performance CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, for
seamless data management.
Speakers:
Russell Alfeche, Technology Leader, RPA at qBotic and UiPath MVP
Charlie Greenberg, host
Freshworks Rethinks NoSQL for Rapid Scaling & Cost-EfficiencyScyllaDB
Â
Freshworks creates AI-boosted business software that helps employees work more efficiently and effectively. Managing data across multiple RDBMS and NoSQL databases was already a challenge at their current scale. To prepare for 10X growth, they knew it was time to rethink their database strategy. Learn how they architected a solution that would simplify scaling while keeping costs under control.
Main news related to the CCS TSI 2023 (2023/1695)Jakub Marek
Â
An English đŹđ§ translation of a presentation to the speech I gave about the main changes brought by CCS TSI 2023 at the biggest Czech conference on Communications and signalling systems on Railways, which was held in Clarion Hotel Olomouc from 7th to 9th November 2023 (konferenceszt.cz). Attended by around 500 participants and 200 on-line followers.
The original Czech đ¨đż version of the presentation can be found here: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/hlavni-novinky-souvisejici-s-ccs-tsi-2023-2023-1695/269688092 .
The videorecording (in Czech) from the presentation is available here: https://youtu.be/WzjJWm4IyPk?si=SImb06tuXGb30BEH .
Programming Foundation Models with DSPy - Meetup SlidesZilliz
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Prompting language models is hard, while programming language models is easy. In this talk, I will discuss the state-of-the-art framework DSPy for programming foundation models with its powerful optimizers and runtime constraint system.
"Frontline Battles with DDoS: Best practices and Lessons Learned", Igor IvaniukFwdays
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At this talk we will discuss DDoS protection tools and best practices, discuss network architectures and what AWS has to offer. Also, we will look into one of the largest DDoS attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure that happened in February 2022. We'll see, what techniques helped to keep the web resources available for Ukrainians and how AWS improved DDoS protection for all customers based on Ukraine experience
"Choosing proper type of scaling", Olena SyrotaFwdays
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Imagine an IoT processing system that is already quite mature and production-ready and for which client coverage is growing and scaling and performance aspects are life and death questions. The system has Redis, MongoDB, and stream processing based on ksqldb. In this talk, firstly, we will analyze scaling approaches and then select the proper ones for our system.
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
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Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as âkeysâ). In fact, itâs unlikely youâll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, theyâll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
Youâll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
âTemporal Event Neural Networks: A More Efficient Alternative to the Transfor...Edge AI and Vision Alliance
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For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/temporal-event-neural-networks-a-more-efficient-alternative-to-the-transformer-a-presentation-from-brainchip/
Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at BrainChip , presents the âTemporal Event Neural Networks: A More Efficient Alternative to the Transformerâ tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
The expansion of AI services necessitates enhanced computational capabilities on edge devices. Temporal Event Neural Networks (TENNs), developed by BrainChip, represent a novel and highly efficient state-space network. TENNs demonstrate exceptional proficiency in handling multi-dimensional streaming data, facilitating advancements in object detection, action recognition, speech enhancement and language model/sequence generation. Through the utilization of polynomial-based continuous convolutions, TENNs streamline models, expedite training processes and significantly diminish memory requirements, achieving notable reductions of up to 50x in parameters and 5,000x in energy consumption compared to prevailing methodologies like transformers.
Integration with BrainChipâs Akida neuromorphic hardware IP further enhances TENNsâ capabilities, enabling the realization of highly capable, portable and passively cooled edge devices. This presentation delves into the technical innovations underlying TENNs, presents real-world benchmarks, and elucidates how this cutting-edge approach is positioned to revolutionize edge AI across diverse applications.
Dandelion Hashtable: beyond billion requests per second on a commodity serverAntonios Katsarakis
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This slide deck presents DLHT, a concurrent in-memory hashtable. Despite efforts to optimize hashtables, that go as far as sacrificing core functionality, state-of-the-art designs still incur multiple memory accesses per request and block request processing in three cases. First, most hashtables block while waiting for data to be retrieved from memory. Second, open-addressing designs, which represent the current state-of-the-art, either cannot free index slots on deletes or must block all requests to do so. Third, index resizes block every request until all objects are copied to the new index. Defying folklore wisdom, DLHT forgoes open-addressing and adopts a fully-featured and memory-aware closed-addressing design based on bounded cache-line-chaining. This design offers lock-free index operations and deletes that free slots instantly, (2) completes most requests with a single memory access, (3) utilizes software prefetching to hide memory latencies, and (4) employs a novel non-blocking and parallel resizing. In a commodity server and a memory-resident workload, DLHT surpasses 1.6B requests per second and provides 3.5x (12x) the throughput of the state-of-the-art closed-addressing (open-addressing) resizable hashtable on Gets (Deletes).
AppSec PNW: Android and iOS Application Security with MobSFAjin Abraham
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Mobile Security Framework - MobSF is a free and open source automated mobile application security testing environment designed to help security engineers, researchers, developers, and penetration testers to identify security vulnerabilities, malicious behaviours and privacy concerns in mobile applications using static and dynamic analysis. It supports all the popular mobile application binaries and source code formats built for Android and iOS devices. In addition to automated security assessment, it also offers an interactive testing environment to build and execute scenario based test/fuzz cases against the application.
This talk covers:
Using MobSF for static analysis of mobile applications.
Interactive dynamic security assessment of Android and iOS applications.
Solving Mobile app CTF challenges.
Reverse engineering and runtime analysis of Mobile malware.
How to shift left and integrate MobSF/mobsfscan SAST and DAST in your build pipeline.
How to Interpret Trends in the Kalyan Rajdhani Mix Chart.pdfChart Kalyan
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Your One-Stop Shop for Python Success: Top 10 US Python Development Providersakankshawande
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âHow Axelera AI Uses Digital Compute-in-memory to Deliver Fast and Energy-eff...Edge AI and Vision Alliance
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For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/how-axelera-ai-uses-digital-compute-in-memory-to-deliver-fast-and-energy-efficient-computer-vision-a-presentation-from-axelera-ai/
Bram Verhoef, Head of Machine Learning at Axelera AI, presents the âHow Axelera AI Uses Digital Compute-in-memory to Deliver Fast and Energy-efficient Computer Visionâ tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
As artificial intelligence inference transitions from cloud environments to edge locations, computer vision applications achieve heightened responsiveness, reliability and privacy. This migration, however, introduces the challenge of operating within the stringent confines of resource constraints typical at the edge, including small form factors, low energy budgets and diminished memory and computational capacities. Axelera AI addresses these challenges through an innovative approach of performing digital computations within memory itself. This technique facilitates the realization of high-performance, energy-efficient and cost-effective computer vision capabilities at the thin and thick edge, extending the frontier of what is achievable with current technologies.
In this presentation, Verhoef unveils his companyâs pioneering chip technology and demonstrates its capacity to deliver exceptional frames-per-second performance across a range of standard computer vision networks typical of applications in security, surveillance and the industrial sector. This shows that advanced computer vision can be accessible and efficient, even at the very edge of our technological ecosystem.
âHow Axelera AI Uses Digital Compute-in-memory to Deliver Fast and Energy-eff...
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TSF Tele Sistemi Ferrovian- Cisco
1. Customer Case Study
Outsourcing Provider Transforms Business Model
Italian ICT company TSF adopts Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision to create new, on-demand
cloud services.
Challenge
Executive Summary Tele Sistemi Ferroviari (TSF) is one of the leading providers of
Customer Name: ICT services to the transport and logistics industries in Italy.
Tele Sistemi Ferroviari It was set up as a spin-off from the ICT division of the Italian
State Railways Group which remains TSFâs biggest customer.
Industry: Technology
Location: Rome, Italy TSFâs goal was to build on a period of strong business growth,
Company size: 700 employees while reducing its dependency on one revenue source in order
to minimize risk. The company aimed to win new business
Challenge from existing customers and reach new customers in different
⢠Desire to change business model in industries. TSF also wanted to ensure that it was ready to take
order to win new customers advantage of the economic upturn, when it arrived.
Solution
âWe believed that the time was right to change from a hosted
⢠Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision,
service delivery model to pay-per-use,â says Francesco
architectures, and technologies
Barbieri, Manager of Data Center Operations at TSF. âThis would
Results enable us to create an extremely agile infrastructure, lower our
⢠Revenues from new IaaS services alone CapEx and OpEx, and sell new services at competitive prices
to reach 2-3 percent of total revenues in
to customers in a broader range of industries.â
first year
⢠Huge CapEx and OpEx savings from To achieve all this, the company would have to adopt a new
agile, simplified infrastructure business model and transform its IT infrastructure from a
⢠Cost reductions include: cabling costs cost center into a revenue generator. Being able to respond
70 percent, new server provisioning 25 to customersâ needs more quickly and cost effectively was
percent, power consumption 60 percent
an urgent priority. Previously, TSF would buy new, dedicated
⢠TSF is strongly placed to become
hardware for each project, an approach that was no longer
a leader in the cloud computing
services market
flexible enough; for example, it took about a week to provision
a new service.
Using this traditional model, TSF had built up five separate data centers, each dedicated to a customer portfolio
or a major application such as railway ticketing. The silos operated independently of each other, needed large
amounts of space, consumed huge quantities of power, and were costly and time-consuming to manage.
Because there was minimal connectivity between the data centers, demand for extra capacity in one location
could not be met by under-utilized capacity in another. As a result, TSF would continue buying more devices
until a data center was full and then open a new facility, which increased complexity and costs. Functions such
as management and support were duplicated, which required higher staffing levels and put extra pressure on
computing and storage resources, raising costs still further.
TSF envisaged a virtualized data center where resources could be allocated to projects from a consolidated
âpoolâ in a flexible and scalable manner. This would enable the company to offer customers more competitive
pricing, faster deployment, and new service options.
All contents are Copyright Š 1992-2010 Cisco Systems. Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 5
2. Customer Case Study
Solution
TSF decided that it could best achieve its goals by using Cisco Data Center 3.0⢠architectures and
technologies. Cisco Data Center 3.0 provides a roadmap for transforming infrastructure through the data center
in three key phases: consolidation, virtualization, and automation. TSF had already embraced Ciscoâs data center
vision three years before, when it embarked on an extensive process of server consolidation followed by an
equally large project to unify and consolidate its storage, using a Cisco storage area network (SAN) solution.
When TSF was ready to create a fully virtualized data center, it developed a model based on a large, powerful
core linked to smaller pods (pools of devices). TSFâs design was based on the ability to unify storage, computing,
and networking capabilities within these pods and provide an integrated, consistent interfaceâabilities that
are inherent to Cisco Data Center 3.0. âWhen Cisco presented Data Center 3.0, we realized this was the right
technology at the right moment for us,â says Barbieri.
TSF decided to base the architecture of its new network, from the core to the access layer, on the Cisco Nexus
family of data center solutions, including Cisco Nexus 7010 switches, Cisco Nexus 5000 switches with Fiber
Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), the Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders, and Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual
switches with VMware vSphere integration. In the network core, Cisco Nexus 7010 ultra-fast switches and Cisco
MDS 9000 SAN switches provide 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 8 Gigabit fiber channel connectivity to the access layer.
The access layer is made up of standard, replicable pods, which are only three racks wide and can be located in
every room inside the data center. TSF built three types of pod to support existing and new applications:
⢠Pods that include Cisco Nexus 5000 switches for connectivity and rack-mountable servers for computing
resources based on either x86 or RISC architectures.
⢠A Unix pod with unified I/O, which is currently being tested and demonstrates the importance of being able to
extend data center networking beyond the x86 architecture to encompass all aspects of connectivity.
⢠Pods based on the Cisco Unified Computing Systemâ˘, with UCS 6120 Fabric Interconnects for connectivity
and the UCS 5100 Series Blade Server chassis and B2000 blades for computing resources. This type of pod
includes the VMware vSphere virtualization platform which, together with the Cisco Nexus 1000V, gives the
network virtual machine-awareness.
In fact, each type of pod makes extensive use of unified fabric technologies, which greatly reduce the number of
adapters and cables needed for intra-rack and inter-pod connectivity.
A dedicated service layer connected to the collapsed core-distribution layer provides advanced network
services such as load balancing and firewalls. The network core also acts as the bridge between the new data
center and the legacy data center, enabling TSF to migrate existing services from the old infrastructure to the
new one simply by powering on the existing virtual machines in the new vSphere-over-UCS environment.
âCisco listened to our ideas and needs, then helped us
develop our ideas and translate them into something
concrete.â
âMarco Barbalinardo, Manager of Network and Telecoms, TSF
The Cisco team worked closely with TSF to help the company develop its data center vision and architecture,
and then deploy the solutions that would realize the vision. There were several meetings between the two
partners and discussions with Cisco technology specialists, including a visit to the Cisco headquarters in San
Jose to talk to some of the engineers who developed Data Center 3.0.
âThe way that we interacted with Cisco to get this project off the ground was not the kind of help you can buy at
a list price,â says Marco Barbalinardo, Manager of Network and Telecoms at TSF. âCisco listened to our ideas and
needs, then helped us develop our ideas and translate them into something concrete. They did a wonderful job.â
All contents are Copyright Š 1992-2010 Cisco Systems. Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 2 of 5
3. Customer Case Study
âWithout Cisco Services, we would not have been able to
deploy the new solutions so quickly and with so little risk.â
âAlberto Giaccone, Data Center Network Operations Manager, TSF
The Cisco Services organization became involved at the deployment phase, providing assistance with some
design elements, verification, and training and knowledge transfer through its Advanced Services portfolio.
Cisco Services then validated the entire project and helped TSF to create a scaling model for the Cisco Unified
Computing System (UCS). They also implemented UCS in the new data center and supported TSF throughout
the deployment. âWithout Cisco Services, we would not have been able to deploy the new solutions so quickly
and with so little risk,â says Alberto Giaccone, Data Center Network Operations Manager at TSF.
Results
Building a completely different type of data center has enabled TSF to achieve its objective of changing its
business model. The company has developed a brand new portfolio, based on selling Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS), which includes services such as Internet connectivity, storage, archiving and back-up, and virtual
computing power. TSF has identified a strong demand in the enterprise and medium-sized business markets
and expects revenues from the new services to reach 2-3 percent of total revenues and 20-28 percent of
current revenues from infrastructure services.
TSF has structured its pay-per-use model for maximum simplicity, convenience, and flexibility. It gives customers
several different options on pricing, configuration, and capacity; for example, there are six tiers of storage
services graded by cost and performance. TSF does not charge set-up costs; instead each service is built
around a monthly fee, and customers pay nothing further as soon as their service is terminated.
Combined with real-time provisioning, this transparent cost structure makes the service model very attractive to
customers whose requirements are short-term, unscheduled, or difficult to predict, and to any companies that
do not wish to purchase equipment for whatever reason.
TSF benefits from the new model as much as its customers. Having invested in a scalable and agile architecture,
the company is now in a position to grow its business at minimal extra costs. This is partly because TSF no
longer needs to purchase dedicated new equipment for each new customer or project; instead, it can allocate
existing resources as needed.
In addition to reducing CapEx in the long-term, TSF has significantly lowered its OpEx from day one. Higher
server density means that the new facility uses one-tenth of the space required by TSFâs legacy data centers.
Previously, for example, one pod could only have contained 38 servers, but thanks to the power and versatility
of the Cisco Unified Computing System a pod can now contain the equivalent of 144 servers. As a result of such
improvements, TSF has reduced its power consumption by about 60 percent, which not only cuts fuel bills but
also creates an environment that is more environmentally sustainable.
Unified fabric in the pods has enabled TSF to reduce its cabling requirements from eight cables on a single
server, to two cables for every eight servers. Cabling costs alone have dropped by about 70 percent in the new
data center, a significant figure because they used to represent up to 30 percent of each new deployment. The
total cost for provisioning a new server has fallen by about 25 percent, which reflects the new-found simplicity
of the task. It now takes a day or less to provision a new service, compared with a week to mount and cable a
new server in the legacy data centers. As a result, staff are more productive and become available to support
additional customers and services as the business develops.
âWe now have an architecture that fits with our business and allows us to grow in a linear way, taking on new
customers at a marginal cost and offering new services at very competitive prices,â says Barbalinardo.
All contents are Copyright Š 1992-2010 Cisco Systems. Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 3 of 5
4. Customer Case Study
âThere is a huge market for cloud computing services
from companies that do not want to manage their own
IT infrastructures. We are one of the first companies in
Italy to address this type of market, using an extremely
scalable and agile infrastructure that adapts easily and
quickly to the needs of many customers.â
âFrancesco Barbieri, Manager of Data Center Operations, TSF
Next Steps
TSF will continue to develop its business and its infrastructure in parallel, starting with a massive project to
virtualize 70-75 percent of the companyâs servers. The company has developed a model for optimizing this
process by determining the virtual server that best matches each physical server in the legacy data centers.
TSF also plans to address automation, the next logical stage of the process, first in its data center operations
to help manage 3000 servers and then, when the volume of new services reaches an agreed level, to offer
customers automated, self-service provisioning of non-custom services.
At the same time, TSF is moving further into cloud computing by developing a Platform as a Service (PaaS)
offering based on access to a shared database cluster. Customers will pay a monthly fee for their âsegmentâ of
the cluster, thereby reducing their expenditure on software licences, which currently accounts for 50 percent
of many companiesâ IT software budgets. TSF is likely to take a similar approach with middleware, developing
services targeted at several industries as part of its PaaS portfolio. In the field of Software as a Service (SaaS),
however, TSF will probably focus on applications for transport and logistics, its core area of expertise.
âThere is a huge market for cloud computing services from companies that do not want to manage their own
IT infrastructures. We are one of the first companies in Italy to address this type of market, using an extremely
scalable and agile infrastructure that adapts easily and quickly to the needs of many customers,â says Barbieri.
Technology Blueprint
Cisco Data Center 3.0 consists of an architecture and technology roadmap that are designed to help companies
transform their data centers to a virtualized model, in order to achieve the agility, performance, and cost-
efficiency needed by the business.
An important element of the Data Center 3.0 technology portfolio is the Cisco Unified Computing System
(UCS) which integrates a 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with x86-archtecture servers, providing an
integrated, scalable, multichassis platform that operates, and is managed, as a cohesive system. This design
closely resembles TSFâs own vision for its new data center, in which a series of pods (pools of devices) provide
huge amounts of computing power in compact units that also include a consistent interface to SANs (via Fibre
Channel over Ethernet) and to the backbone.
âCiscoâs vision of the data center is very close to our vision,â says Barbieri. âI would describe the Unified
Computing System as a âthinking networkâ that lets you create one environment in your data center. The
technology in UCS is complex and you have to take the time to understand it but, once youâve done that, you
have a much faster and simpler operation.â
TSF is benefiting from many capabilities of UCS, such as its stateless design whereby system parameters are
stored independently as software files that are simply moved to the appropriate location when a particular
resource is needed. TSF has created several such files, or templates, representing many of the situations that
occur in its data center. This approach helps to automate operations, and also strengthens the resilience of the
infrastructure by enabling TSF to provide a new server within a few minutes, in the event of a failure, compared
with 4-5 hours previously. As a result, TSF can guarantee to comply with very stringent SLAs without incurring
the cost of deploying additional hardware for redundancy.
All contents are Copyright Š 1992-2010 Cisco Systems. Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 4 of 5
5. Customer Case Study
The Cisco Unified Computing System has also enabled TSF to fully optimize its server virtualization model. The
two variables that influence how much a serverâs capacity is maximized during virtualization are computing
power and RAM. Because computing power is more expensive than memory, TSFâs model is based on
saturating the computing power before the memory, using a saturation point of 92 Gbytes. At first this seemed
unachievable because TSFâs original virtualization model was based on 64 Gbytes, the maximum amount of
memory in its legacy servers. Because each UCS server blade has a RAM capacity of 96 Gbytes, however, TSF
will now be able to ensure that it utilizes all its computing resources during the virtualization process, thereby
getting the maximum value from these assets.
TSF is deploying its new services in the new data center, while it continues to host about 400 applications in
its legacy data centers. The company is sharing information between the two environments, which are also
managed by the same solution, but it has no plans to migrate any of the legacy applications to the new platform.
TSF has equipped the Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches in its legacy data centers with the Cisco Application Control
Engine from its Data Center 3.0 portfolio, a virtualized load-balancing and application-delivery solution that
increases the availability and performance of essential applications.
For More Information
Please visit:
http://www.cisco.com/go/datacenter
http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedfabric
http://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputing
http://www.cisco.com/go/nexus
http://www.cisco.com/go/whymds
PRODUCT LIST
The TSF data center architecture is based on the following products:
Collapsed core and distribution layer
⢠Cisco Nexus 7010 switches
Service layer
⢠Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches with 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE),
and firewalls
Extension layer
⢠Cisco Catalyst 6509 switches with 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity
Storage core layer
⢠Cisco MDS 9000 Series switches for Storage Networking
Rack-mount server pod
⢠Cisco Nexus 5000 switches with FCoE and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders
Unified Computing pod
⢠Cisco Unified Computing System with UCS B-Series Blade Servers and Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switches
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