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Hurricane Irene No Match for Collaboration Technologies

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

As you may have seen from previous posts, TBL eats its own dog food. Even in the wake of wide spread power disruptions and communication network outages, TBL is able to continue operations and support its clients. As I write this post sitting in a local area Starbucks, I cannot help but think about what it was like, even a few short years ago, and how things have changed. In a matter of moments, I’ll be posting this article to our website; I’m able to instant message with co-workers, client and partners on Cisco Jabber; And, I can receive phone calls via Single Number Reach from our Communications Manager.

This is all in the face of nearly the entire county where I reside being without power, our corporate office being inaccessible for the day, and more than 1.2 million others throughout the area without power or communication services. So as you go about your day, raking leaves, cutting up brush, refueling your generators, or even responding to the occasional email…just stop and think for a moment – how technology has changed your life or business, and just imagine what could be possible tomorrow.

Tropical Depression Eight

New Features in Attendant Console 8.5/8.6

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

I typically refrain from blogging product update news, but that’s really more of a guideline than a rule. Specifically, there have been some recent changes to the attendant console product line from Cisco (ARC OEM) that look to bridge the feature gap between it and the legacy attendant console as well as quell some concerns a number of other areas.

Most notable of these changes are:

1) Session based licensing – Better known as concurrent user licensing, this change brings the attendant console product line back in line with most other Cisco collaboration products. This has long been asked for and well most certainly ease budget concerns for customers who have a number of people who could be managing a call queue at any one time.

2) Forced Delivery – This feature will have the attendants phone actually ring in lieu of the previous behavior of the console ringing first and the call being delivered to the IP phone after accepting the call. When compared to the legacy attendant console package, this behavior generates most of the complaints regarding difference in functionality.

3) Personal Directory Groups – Yet another feature that has been sorely missed for users who grew up on the legacy attendant console.

To round out the list, some other enhancements included in this release are music in queue, wait time overflow, and some additional search functionality, UC on UCS certification.

Developing Your Own Video Strategy

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

Following on the heels of our latest Lunch and Learn event, I wanted to share some of the thoughts and discussion points discussed therein. We must first recognize that video is here – like it has never been before. Having said that, video is most certainly not a new technology. In fact, many organizations have been utilizing some sort of video within their walls for decades now. So what’s different, and why now?

I argue that the proliferation of video enabled consumer devices will spawn a mass adoption of video related technologies in our personal lives. Think about it, if you had to run to an “email machine” every time you wanted to send an email, you probably wouldn’t use it as much. Proliferation and availability are intrinsically linked user adoption. This inevitably will translate into our professional careers à la instant messaging or social media (facebook, twitter).

Ok, so video is here, your user base is primed for its use, what does this mean for you? First and foremost, companies must begin developing a strategy and providing the technology base to host video services. Without doing so, corporate video content will most certainly make its way to internet based services that most certainly don’t have your corporations best interests at heart. I previously have used a few examples from YouTube of internal sales meetings and holiday parties. With a few keyword searches, I’m sure you could find many of the same.

Secondly, video isn’t something you can just get a quote for and subsequently buy. Video has an incredibly wide definition which forces us to plan for which use cases we are to tackle first, communicate that effectively, and then execute. A solution to provide point to point room based video will quickly spawn questions on how that can be connected to external parties or bridge multiple parties into the same conference. Each of these requires different technology investments and the last thing you want to do is tell your CEO that he can’t do something shortly after writing a big check!

Finally, you have to be able to provide this solution and compete will services that are provided on the internet free of charge. Now that’s a challenge!

Cisco Expands UC Virtualization Support

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

Stand back….this is a pretty big announcement! As of June 7, 2011 Cisco began support for some Collaboration (formerly Unified Communications) applications running in a virtual environment on hardware other than their own Unified Computing System (UCS). The is the first in hopefully many steps to come in widening support for benefits we often realize with typical desktop and server applications running on a VMware hypervisor. The details are as follows.

Cisco is pleased to announce expanded virtualization of Cisco Unified Communications starting Jun 7, 2011.

On Jun 7 Cisco will add two additional virtualized UC offers. Customers will then have three deployment options:

1. UC on UCS – Tested Reference Configurations

2. UC on UCS – Specs-based VMware hardware support

3. HP and IBM – Specs-based VMware hardware support

Phase 1 support begins Jun 7, 2011 and should include the following (see www.cisco.com/go/uc-virtualized for final products and versions supported):

– Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0.2+ and 8.5.1

– Cisco Unified Communications Manager – Session Management Edition 8.5.1

– Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite

– Cisco Unity Connection 8.0.2+ and 8.5.1

– Cisco Unity 7.0.2+ (with Fiber Channel SAN only)

– Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and IP IVR 8.5.1

Support for additional products and versions will phase in over rest of CY11.

Specs-based VMware hardware support adds the following

– UC Compute support for UCS, HP, IBM servers on VMware’s hardware compatibility list and running Intel Xeon 5600 / 7500 family CPUs

– UC Network support for 1Gb through 10Gb NIC, CNA, HBA and Cisco VIC adapters that are supported by above servers

– UC Storage support for DAS, SAN (Fiber Channel, iSCSI, FCoE) and NAS (NFS).

– More co-resident UC VMs per physical server if more powerful CPUs are used

– Note that UC / non-UC / 3rd-party co-residency is still not supported.

– Note that hardware oversubscription is still not supported by UC.

– No changes to VMware product, version or feature support by UC

This most certainly gives us far more agility for the manner in which we deploy these applications. More info to come as I get it…

Fun with Cisco – Tablets, Streaming and TelePresence

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Steve Glissman

There are many great things about working for TBL Networks (e.g. TBL’s very liberal cocoa policy). In addition, as 2010 Collaboration Partner of the Year for Cisco’s East Area, I receive the opportunity to use and experience cutting-edge technology as it is released. Below are some examples.

Cisco Cius

As the trend continues towards tablets (nearly 9 million tablets in use at small and midsize businesses in the U.S), Cisco has entered the market with the Cisco Cius. As the first business tablet for mobile collaboration, the Android powered tablet brings the mobility of a tablet with the collaborative power of Cisco, including Cisco Quad, Presence, IM and integrated, one-click access to WebEx Meeting Center.

Recently, TBL’s Cameron Corbin was photographed with tablet. In addition, Cameron also got the chance to ride hoverboard and pet a unicorn. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of that … yet.

Cisco TelePresence System 1100

I have always wondered if there would be a day when I would think, “The future is here.” I had pinned my hopes on Dippin Dots giving me a specific date, but thanks to Cisco, I can safely say that the future has arrived.

The Cisco TelePresence System 1100 allows you to have the intimacy of a face-to-face meeting without the difficulty and cost of travel. Perhaps most importantly, you can finally reenact your favorite scene from Star Trek in the comfort of your own office.

Cisco Show and Share

Cisco Show and Share is a webcasting and video sharing application that helps enterprise organizations create highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise.

In addition to using the video for internal purposes, you can also use Show and Share to broadcast your video live to external viewers. Recently, TBL Networks streamed a live performance from Harley Stagner and the 46ers on the May 5^th edition of Ask Harley using Show and Share.

In the video below, you can see the performance being watched via TBL’s live stream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JVB-l09Ncs&feature=channel_video_title

End to end virtual network security with the Cisco Nexus VSG

Posted on April 11, 2011February 11, 2019 by admin

So I’ve been spending a lot of time in our lab with the Cisco Nexus Virtual Security Gateway. I have come to the conclusion that it rocks! Finally, the virtual infrastructure is no longer treated as a second class citizen when it comes to securing network traffic between virtual machines. We are at a point now with the Cisco VSG that we can have robust Cisco infrastructure, including security, from the upstream physical network to the virtual network.

The Cisco Nexus VSG builds upon the Nexus 1000v distributed virtual switch and communicates with the Virtual Ethernet Modules in the Nexus 1000v to provide a very robust security policy engine that can perform granular filtering and matching on a number of parameters. For example:

Network (ip address, port number, etc.)
VM (VM Name, Installed OS Name, Cluster, Host, Zone)

Yep, that’s right, I said VM. Since the Cisco VSG integrates with the vSphere API’s and vCenter, you can filter on items like a virtual machine name or partial name, installed OS, cluster, etc. This is very powerful. I no longer have to rely on network and IP rules alone to filter traffic between virtual machines. This is a more intelligent approach to filtering that really highlights the synergies that Cisco and VMware have established. Best of all, once it is set up everything is managed from a single Cisco Virtual Network Management Center (VNMC) instance. This web-based management tool let’s you manage multiple Virtual Security Gateway instances. Let’s look at a simple example of how easy it is to perform traffic filtering in the virtual infrastructure with the Cisco VSG.

Topology and Components:

vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus Host Servers
Cisco VNMC VM
Cisco Nexus 1000v Infrastructure
Cisco VSG Infrastructure
tenanta-srv1 VM
tenanta-srv2 VM
tenantb-srv1 VM
tenantb-srv2 VM

The goal of this configuration is to allow the following communication flows:

tenanta-srv1 and tenanta-srv2 should communicate
tenantb-srv1 and tenantb-srv2 should communicate
The Tenant A servers(tenanta-srv1 and tenanta-srv2) should not be able to communicate with the Tenant B servers (tenantb-srv1 and tenantb-srv2)
Anyone else should be able to communicate with both the Tenant A and Tenant B servers
There is a further caveat that the Tenant A and Tenant B servers are both on the same subnet (don’t worry these servers belong to the same company )

Below are the network settings:

tenanta-srv1 VM – 10.91.41.200
tenanta-srv2 VM – 10.91.41.201
tenantb-srv1 VM – 10.91.41.202
tenantb-srv2 VM – 10.91.41.203
a client with another ip address

Here are the general steps for setting up this scenario once the Cisco VSG infrastructure is in place:

Create a tenant
Assign the VSG to the tenant
Create a zone each for the Tenant A and Tenant B servers (these zones match VM’s with names that contain “tenanta” and “tenantb” respectively)
Create a firewall policy for the VSG
Create a policy set that includes the policy
Bind the policy set to the VSG
Bind the tenant to a port-profile so that any VM that is on that port-profile is filtered with the policy rules

Below are the screenshots of the results after the VSG was configured.

These are the only rules that are required for the communication flows.

Here is what the port-profile looks like on the Nexus 1000v. Notice the org and vn-service entries. This means that this port profile is VSG aware.

The ICMP traffic from the Tenant A Servers.

The ICMP traffic from the Tenant B Servers (same result as the Tenant A servers. Only one is shown here.)

Finally the results from the external client

As you can see, we achieved our goal with just three filtering rules. Also, we were able to leverage VM name filtering instead of IP filtering which allowed us to filter on the same subnet without resorting to naming each IP address or different port numbers. Very cool! The Cisco VSG is capable of many complex configurations combining both networking categories (ip, port number, etc.) and VM categories. This was just a quick example of what can be done. As always, if you have any questions or would like to see a live demo feel free to contact me.

Fun with WebEx

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Steve Glissman

To read our special photoblog about WebEx, go to http://tblnetworks.tumblr.com/post/3701677110/fun-with-webex

Snow Days and Cisco UC

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Steve Glissman

As a kid, there were few events more exciting than a Snow Day. Growing up in Virginia Beach, true snow storms were rare, but fortunately for me, the bar for defining “snow” was set very low. An outbreak of dandruff in the school administration could easily prompt a school closing, allowing the adults to focus their energy on urgent winter weather matters; namely, raiding the grocery store for bread and milk. (Why do people instinctively hoard milk when snow arrives? If I am trapped in my house, I am going to start making my own cheese on Day Three?)

Unfortunately, as an adult, the responsibilities of the office do not stop when storms begin. You need the ability to productively conduct your business and reach your customers and clients, who in turn need be able to reach you.

The severity of a recent Richmond snowstorm (three-to-five inches of snow, which in Southern measurement equates to three-to-five feet) necessitated the evacuation of TBL Worldwide Headquarters. As a good soldier, I was willing to forgo my normal Snow Day routine (The Godfather I and II and several seasonal Sam Adams) to remain at the office and risk life and limb for the company. Then I received the following email:

“Go home! We all have laptops, VPN access, WebEx and cell phones with SNR should you need to continue any work.”

With this message, I was freed from the bonds of the office and business casual pants. Arriving at home, I decided to demonstrate my productivity by documenting how I can use Cisco Unified Communications while still enjoying my Snow Day routine.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

Using Cisco AnyConnect VPN, I can securely access all my email, corporate network and CRM (e.g. Salesforce.com) from the comfort of home. In addition, AnyConnect would securely guard my Godfather themed web searches for the day. For instance, did you know that Gianni Russo, the actor who portrayed Carlo Rizzi, has fathered 11 children with 10 different women and has an eponymous line of wine? I was able to obtain that urgent information while maintaining top-level security.

If my laptop decides to have its own Snow Day, it is not a problem, as AnyConnect is available for iPhone and BlackBerry. I can securely access my email, network and CRM info via my Smartphone.

Cisco WebEx

Traveling for business is never fun, but it can be exceptionally difficult during the winter, as your schedule is tied to the whims of Mother Nature. Despite being trapped on my couch with an Old Fezziwig Ale, I could still meet with my clients via Cisco WebEx. Cisco WebEx allows me to make presentations, in addition to capabilities such as document sharing and presentation recording. If the participants have access to webcams, we can see each other face to face. And, of course, if my laptop catches a cold from the snow, I can use Cisco WebEx on my Smartphone.

Single Number Reach (SNR)

Utilizing Cisco Unified Mobility, I don’t have to worry if my clients have my cell phone number, or rush to change my voicemail message. Single Number Reach (SNR) allows me to provide one phone number with no additional complications.
SNR is more than call forwarding. Whereas call forwarding could result with my client leaving a message on my personal voicemail, SNR allows the client to leave a message in my work voicemail. When I return my client’s call, SNR presents my office number, even if I am using my personal cell phone.

With the power of Cisco Unified Communications, Snow Days are no longer an impediment to productivity. And that is an offer that I can’t refuse.