BYOD: Bring Your Own Device Seminar

Presented by Adcap’s CTO, Rolf Versluis

Featuring Cisco and MobileIron Technologies

This event was a great success in Atlanta!

Now it’s your turn to receive the valuable information presented by

Adcap, Cisco and MobileIron!

• How to enhance employee productivity and user experience.
• How to create and deploy a successful mobile strategy.
• The ROI of early adoption.
• Compliance and sustainability tactics.
• How to best manage employees’ personal devices on an organization’s network.
• The support of Android and Apple platforms.
• How to secure VPN.

Cisco and MobileIron have developed a variety of products and services to enable organizations to embrace the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era, while protecting business assets, critical services, and employees.

This is not one to miss: FREE lunch and prizes!

Flexpod Cloud Solution

Scalable | Agile | Virtual

• Today’s Business Challenges
• Next-Generation Data Center
• The FlexPod Solution
• FlexPod for VMware

 

Presented by:  Adcap Solution Architect,

Steve Norton 

 

 

 

 

When/Where:

Wednesday, June 20th

10:00am – 2:00pm

Adcap Headquarters

10400 Old Alabama Rd Connector, Ste 100

Alpharetta, GA  30022

 

Register Now!

Don’t miss this informative and FREE luncheon workshop!

 

June 5th @ Adcap Headquarters, Atlanta

Join us for The Ultimate Test Drive where you’ll get hands-on experience with Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewall.

In this free half-day technical workshop you will configure security policies that will ultimately restore visibility and control over the applications, users and content traversing your network.

Attend this workshop and get a chance to win The Ultimate Grand Prize Trip to a performance driving school.

At the end of this workshop you will have:

• Established policies to enable applications based on users and groups
• Learned how to enable application features while restricting others
• Configured a policy that decrypts, inspects and allows SSL

Please plan to bring your laptop, with RDP client!

Agenda:

12:00PM : Lunch
12:30PM : Welcome
1:00PM : Demo/Workshop
4:00PM : Departure

Space is limited!  Contact Michelle Temple, Adcap Marketing Director Today!

(678) 456-6755  OR  mtemple@adcapnet.com

Tuesday, June 5th

12:00PM – 4:00PM

Adcap Network Systems
10400 Old Alabama Rd. Connector, Ste. 100. Alpharetta, GA 30022

This product from Cisco is an important element of an organization’s mobility strategy. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets on the internal wireless networks, and the necessity of keeping the data network and application servers running so everyone can get their work done, ISE fills the gap by:

• Authenticating users on mobile devices.
• Profiling devices based on signature.
• Applying access policies to devices based on identity and profile.
• Allowing employee sponsored guest access to network.
• Applying security policy at network elements like switches, wireless controller, and routers or inline.

Adcap Presents a NEW Florida Geeknick on:

Flexpod Cloud Solution

Scalable | Agile | Virtual

Don’t miss this informative and FREE luncheon workshop!

Cisco Jabber for Video

There are actually two free versions of Jabber, and they are both fully functional. One of them is Cisco Jabber Video, and you can download and run it just about immediately. It is supported on Windows, Mac, and iPad right now, with Android support coming soon. It provides desktop HD video calling with any other standards based video system. Standards based is hugely important. It follows these standards:

• SIP and H.323
• URI dialing
• H.264 video standard
• Resolution up to 1080p at 30 frames per second

If you want to have a business video call then you need to be able to make calls across the internet with URI dialing (usually in email address format) using SIP and H.264. You can register for your own @jabber.com account for free and start calling right away. This is real business video, not consumer class limited access video.

Cisco Jabber Instant Messaging

This is the new offer announced last week, and it provides the capability for every existing Cisco voice customer to roll out a universal presence and chat client for everyone at their company, on every device. It is significant because there is a large installed base of Cisco VoIP phone system customers, and many want to add Presence and Instant Message capability.

The Jabber IM client is/will be available on Windows, Mac, iOS (iPad and iPhone), Android, and Blackberry.

Cisco Jabber IM will provide these features:

• Presence status
• One-on-one and group chat
• File transfer
• Server IM logging
• Client chat history
• Federations: Existing except AOL
• Experience: Only see IM features
• Microsoft Office 2007/10 Presence and Click to IM (Windows)
• Initiate, join Cisco WebEx® meetings for Mac, Windows (2HCY12)
• Mobile: iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Cisco Cius, Android (2HCY12)

The free client provides a good base set of features, and it is upgradable to the full Jabber client that allows for Cisco phone integration with the purchase of a license upgrade. The free licenses can also operate at the same time as the full licenses, so Instant Messaging can be provided to users that do not have phones assigned to them.

It is specifically deployed by adding the Cisco Presence server onto the Cisco Communications Manager. Cisco provides all the server and client side licensing, and the customer has to provide the physical or virtual server to run the Presence application. The Presence version supported for the free Jabber client deployment is 8.6.4, which is compatible with Communications Manager version 7.1.2 and above.

The free licenses can be ordered in May, with shipment starting in early June (Cisco Live timeframe). If you are interested in doing this, give us a call!

The engineers at Adcap are experts at implementing complex technology systems while working closely with our customers to help them improve their business operations. As expectations ramp up for technologies to perform at the highest level, it’s even more important to be able to deliver integrated solutions that are both useful and reliable.

Foundational to these solutions are the Cisco Architectures that provide operations improvements to our customers. These improvements lead directly to better customer service, lower costs, and improved profitability. These benefits are important for all types of organizations, whether education, local government, healthcare, manufacturing, or professional services.

Major solution trends for the next decade are Cloud, Mobility, and Collaboration. These solutions help organizations stay competitive and enable them to improve their operations. The thing is, these are not simple products that can be purchased and slapped into place. These solutions have to be designed around an organization’s business model, integrated into the existing network and operations, and kept operational for an organization to see the true value of the solution.

These solutions need a combination of a visionary technology leader like Cisco Systems partnered with a local service provider that is intimately familiar their implementation, like Adcap.

Cloud

Adcap works with customers to deliver private cloud solutions that enable rapid deployment of new applications, consolidation of servers in the datacenter through virtualization, and rollout of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This builds a more flexible and resilient datacenter that enables our customers to have the right versions of the right applications working reliably.

Businesses rely on having their information systems work well, and private cloud architectures make that happen. Adcap is expert at delivering private clouds using the FlexPod architecture with validated designs of Cisco servers and core switching, NetApp storage, and VMware virtualization. We run these system internally, and have complete FlexPod’s for proof of concepts at our customer sites

Mobility

Mobility is the ability to work anytime, anywhere, anyplace, with any device. Instead of just being able to work when sitting in front of a PC, a true mobility strategy enables ubiquitous access to organization applications using any type of computing device. Different organizations have different care-abouts for mobility, and it is important for Adcap’s team to recognize the priorities. The devices and applications are important, but just as important for Mobility is to have a secure network architecture that has the bandwidth, reliability, and manageability to take full advantage of a mobile strategy.

Collaboration

Cisco Collaboration encompasses the flexible and powerful VoIP telephone system, presence, chat, document sharing, video conferencing, recording, and delivery. It describes the ability for people to communicate with each other in a myriad of ways that goes above and beyond phone calls and email. Cisco video is transforming communication with easy to use high definition desktop video, easy video conferencing, and powerful video recording and delivery. The Cisco Jabber client runs on all types of end user devices, and is the complete client for voice, video, presence, chat, and sharing. Adcap Network Systems has been a leader in Cisco Collaboration since our inception, and this is still a major focus for Adcap.

Architectures on the Network

The exciting thing about working with Cisco as a solution integrator is the ability to depend on Cisco to deliver complete Architectures that build on each other. Organizations are not going to just want to choose to implement one of the major trends of Cloud, Mobility, or Collaboration – they are going to want them all!

And one of the most important elements of the Cisco Architectures is the requirement to deliver a well performing network that is secure, manageable, and has the ability to differentiate and prioritize between voice, video, and other types of traffic. In order to reap the benefits of the investments, companies have to know that the technology they buy is going to work as planned.

Adcap Network Systems’s customers are the beneficiaries of our dedication to being Cisco experts. As a visionary leader, Cisco Systems invests significantly in the creation of complete Architectures that form the foundation for Cloud, Mobility, and Collaboration solutions.

These solutions are already transforming how organizations operate, and Adcap is proud to continue to work closely with Cisco as we move forward together to design, deploy, manage, and support these solutions at our customers.

BYOD: Bring Your Own Device seminar

Featuring Cisco and MobileIron Technologies

Presented by Adcap CTO, Rolf Versluis

• How to enhance employee productivity and user experience.
• How to create and deploy a successful mobile strategy.
• The ROI of early adoption.
• Compliance and sustainability tactics.
• How to best manage employees’ personal devices on an organization’s network.
• The support of Android and Apple platforms.
• How to secure VPN.

Cisco and MobileIron have developed a variety of products and services to enable organizations to embrace the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era, while protecting business assets, critical services, and employees.

This FREE luncheon will discuss how your IT department can support multiple operating systems and secure data, while building and delivering mobile applications.

Maggiano’s Little Italy, Perimeter Mall

Fabric Extenders

Network Admins like to have all the servers connect to one or two main switches, while Server Admins like to have their servers connect to switches at the top of the rack. With traditional Ethernet switches, there are disadvantages to both architectures. Traditional End of Row (or Middle of Row) switching design creates monstrous patch cable tangles, while traditional Top of Rack switching leads to reliability and bandwidth issues. The ideal would be to have one or two switches that can be centrally managed, yet have extensions at the top of each rack for easy server connection.

The Nexus switches have a unique design where remote Fabric Extenders act as remote shelves of the redundant core switches. Each Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender is controlled through multiple 10G copper or fiber uplinks by one Nexus 5000 or 7000 switch, with all management and switching decisions done by the parent switch. Each Fabric Extender can also have a secondary parent, creating reliability though redundancy. A typical deployment would have dual Nexus 2000 FE’s at the top of the rack for servers to dual-home connect to, and would have multiple uplinks to the Middle of Row or End of Row Nexus 5000 or 7000’s. This design creates a high speed and reliable core switching system with straightforward patch cable layouts.

Virtual Port Channel

Datacenters that have multiple rows of server and storage racks are best served by having multiple logical layers of switches, with the traditional design being Core, Distribution, and Access. Servers, storage, and virtualization systems work best when the systems are all in the same Layer 2 organization. The problem is that Layer 2 loop control mechanisms have issues. For example, the most consistently reliable protocol, Spanning Tree Protocol, prevents traffic from traversing half the uplinks by design. That means in a traditional switching environment, uplinks from access to distribution layer switches do not have enough bandwidth, slowing the information transfer where it is needed the most. When possible, Port Channels are used to provide multiple parallel uplinks, but this only works to a single distribution switch, and does not scale well to larger environments.

The Cisco Nexus architecture addresses this issue head on with the adoption of the Virtual Port Channel protocol. It is a special communication between redundant Distribution layer switches that allows for two switches to negotiate Port Channels with any type of Access layer switches. For example, if the Distribution layer was composed of two Nexus 5000 series switches, and the Access layer used existing Cisco Catalyst switches, you could set up Port Channels on each of the access switches, uplink them to both Nexus 5000 switches, and have all uplinks active all the time! Even better, with a setup of dual Nexus 7000 switches at the distribution layer, Nexus 5000’s and 2000’s at the access layers, all of the 10G links will be active with no loops or blocking. Fabulous!

Unified Fabric

Data centers have traditionally operated a dedicated storage network. This means each server required Ethernet Network Interface Cards and Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. With the adoption of 10G Ethernet on the servers, IT administrators are evaluating other options. This has to be done in conjunction with storage array manufacturers because the arrays have to connect into the network somehow. At this point in time, storage arrays are offered with connection at 8G Fibre Channel, 10G iSCSI, 10G Fibre Channel over Ethernet, 10G ATA over Ethernet, and 10G Network Attached Storage.

A dedicated Fibre Channel network has traditionally had an advantage for storage, because it was designed from the beginning to transport SCSI packets fast and reliably. Anything transporting storage over Ethernet has usually had slower performance because protocols had to be put into place to retransmit dropped packets. If the Ethernet network could provide high speed, lossless transmission of SCSI packets with low overhead, it could be a replacement for the Fibre Channel Storage Area Network.

The Nexus Unified Fabric provides upgrades to the Ethernet network to enable high speed lossless transport of Fibre Channel information packets with low overhead through the use of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol. This allows for the gradual elimination of the older and slower SAN. But no organization is going to go out and replace all their existing storage arrays with new ones that have FCoE interfaces on them. So the Nexus 5000 has a special feature that enables conversion from Fibre Channel to FCoE.

The universal ports on the Nexus 5000 allows for any port to have Ethernet or Fibre Channel interfaces. Internally the Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) can map VSAN’s to VLAN’s, and will encapsulate the Fibre Channel traffic into Ethernet frames. To enable lossless transmission of storage at Layer 2 with low overhead, the Nexus switches are set up with Quality of Service to prioritize the storage traffic over all other traffic. This combination of features on the Nexus switches provided for a true datacenter Unified Fabric.

Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The three features of Fabric Extenders, Virtual Port Channel, and Unified Fabric are the main features organization use right away when they implement Cisco Nexus switches for their core upgrades. But there are even more features that are very helpful for connecting to disaster recover sites, integrating with the Cisco Unified Computing System, and improving network security within the switching system. The Cisco Nexus switches truly are the best choice for an organization’s core network upgrade.

Author: Rolf Versluis

Posted at Adcap Network Systems

Adcap Presents a 2012

CCNA Certification Training Session

….content directed by YOUR questions!

• Do you have minimal time and funds to allocate towards training for the CCNA exam?
• Would a full understanding of some networking and design basics help bring the full picture together for you?
• Are there specific questions you wanted answered about the test, as you prepare?