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Karen Snell  spoke to the challenges of broadcasting live 5-10 years ago (“back in the day” in tech years) in her May blog post. Today, with a laptop, internet connection, and a Canon GL2, we are live streaming machines. Watch how we setup Talk2Cisco and re-purpose this content across our social networks.

When schools recently opened in New Orleans this year, Jefferson Parish Public School System (JPPSS) Principal Colleen Winkler asked one of her first graders if she could write her name. The child said, “No, but I can text it.” Schools have always been the center of our communities, and there is no clearer illustration of the central role that technology is taking in our lives. 

Five years ago, Cisco and the Jefferson Parish Public School System partnered in an effort to rebuild the schools following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. JPPSS superintendent, Dr. Diane Roussel, had the foresight to see that technology could transform teaching and learning and keep students engaged. Just days after Hurricane Katrina, with most schools decimated and 28,000 students displaced, Cisco, Jefferson Parish and partners from the private, public and education sectors came together to help. Within one month, Cisco committed $80 million to create the 21st Century Schools initiative to help transform the education systems of eight districts in Louisiana and Mississippi. Shortly after our employees, through the Cisco Leadership Fellows program began working side-by-side with JPPSS employees to transform the district’s technology infrastructure. 

Five years later, the results are impressive.  From 2006-2009, math scores throughout the Jefferson Parish Public School district jumped more than 10 points and English scores jumped 7 points.  Dropouts are down by half with dropouts recorded at 167 in 2006 and only 80 in 2009.  Enrollment is up more than 35 percent. 

Educational opportunities are everywhere! Last week Cisco teamed with the Victorian Department of Early Education and Child Development (DEECD) to provide a connected way of learning that shrunk the 8,000 kilometres between Australia and China and created an engaging and interactive virtual classroom experience over Cisco WebEx.

Education Minister Bronwyn Pike facilitated the real-time and collaborative interaction between Year 9 students from Hume Central Secondary College at the Hume Global Learning Centre’s ideaslab in Broadmeadows, Australia and Year 9 students from Balwyn High School, Glen Waverley Secondary College and the Blackburn English Language School at the Connection 2010 classroom exhibit at the World Expo in Shanghai, China. 

The FCoE confusion spread by networking vendors has reached new heights with contradictory claims that you need TRILL to run multihop FCoE (or maybe you don’t) and that you don’t need congestion control specified in 802.1Qau standard (or maybe you do). Allow me to add to your confusion: they are all correct ... depending on how you implement FCoE.

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog

In his HSRP, vPC and the vPC peer-gateway command post Jeremy Filliben documents how the storage vendors ignore RFCs and implement what they think is proper ARP handling, causing havoc in a redundant network.

Andrew Vonnagy writes about another extreme stupidity customer convenience Microsoft managed to implement: you can turn any Windows 7 into a rogue Access Point. Like we didn’t have enough problems already.

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog

I’m a big movie buff, as well as an always-connected junkie. And that’s why in this week’s tech news two Facebook-related items caught my eye: the buzz around the October 1 release of “The Social Network, a movie reportedly based on Facebook; and Facebook’s launch of Places, a mobile social networking app that broadcasts where you’re at in real time. I think the takeaway for both news items here is whoever and wherever you are, you need to think beyond the moment—and if you’re a parent, that’s especially true.

As for the movie, well, I think it’ll have to be one of those guilty little pleasures that I indulge in even if we already know how the story line will unfold. But given the not infrequent concerns that arise over privacy policies it’ll be interesting to see how well things are handled with Places and other location based services. As an active user of social media, I’m careful, not just for my sake, but for my children’s as well. Online security is a constantly evolving landscape and we need to be more proactive.

Right now, the government is expected to spend over $30 billion on the design and construction of public hospitals across Australia.  With hospitals representing the single biggest component of our recurrent healthcare expenditure it is crucial that health care professionals and consumers alike focus on how we build better and more efficient hospitals. 

This issue is both important and urgent as the hospitals we are building now will frame the way we deliver care for the next 20 years and define how we cope with our aging population. 

This week, the Cisco-sponsored inaugural Australian Digital Hospital Design Workshop kicked off in Melbourne, Australia.  It brought together clinicians, architects, engineers, systems designers, and health IT specialists to look at the physical and technological design of the hospital of the future.

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. - Winston Churchill

As the balmy days of summer give way to crisp autumn mornings, I say to you, good friends, ‘Farewell.’ The summer has flown by - interning with the Cisco Social Media team has been quite the adventure. At this point, my intern video blog has received over 122,000 YouTube views, thanks to more than 1200 Tweets and 1700 Facebook shares. The first video has been viewed over 37,000 times right here on The Platform blog. In Q4 (which runs from mid-May to the end of July), total visitors to The Platform blog increased by 34%. Great stuff. 

Thanks to write-ups in the Wall Street Journal, Mashable, B2B, and beyond, the vlog series has been able to generate some positive buzz as well as an impressive amount of engagement, as other interns, Cisco and non-Cisco alike, sent in video responses from all across the globe. Big props to all the equally interesting interns out there (my claim to be ‘the most interesting’ has, of course, been tongue-in-cheek : ), and a BIG, big thank you to everyone who spread the good word about these vids! I never made it to The Colbert Report…but things are just getting started. If you’d like to keep hanging out, I’ll be on Twitter @GregJustice furthering my quest to live an interesting life. Happy Summer - thanks for stopping by!

Today, we are pleased to welcome ExtendMedia to the Cisco family.  ExtendMedia, a leading provider of software-based Content Management Systems (CMS) that manage the entire lifecycle of video content through monetization for pay media and ad-supported business models.  ExtendMedia is privately-held and based in Newton, Mass., with the majority of its employee base in Toronto,  Canada. ExtendMedia will enable Cisco to help service providers deliver multi-screen offerings as the market transitions to IP video.

In English: video, video, video and more video on any screen, on any network, on any device.

Whenever our family gets in the car for a trip longer than a short jaunt around town, it doesn’t take long to hear the infamous question from one of our two kids,  “How much longer?’

Some readers of my previous post may be asking that of us as well, with regards to the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for the iPhone (iOS 4).  I blogged about the AnyConnect client and support for Apple iOS 4 when Apple initially announced iOS 4 in April .  The number of iPhones in use has since continued to grow with the “IT Consumerization” effect becoming more evident. To support this, the Cisco AnyConnect  client will provide a secure, seamless connection for the iPhone, much like the over 150 million Cisco VPN clients have done up until now.  The team has been hard at work at Cisco and collaborating with Apple to deliver AnyConnect for the iPhone.  While the client isn’t released just yet, it’s coming soon and we will let you know as soon as it is released.  Despite repeated “how much longer” inquiries, my kids usually agree that once we arrive at our destination on those trips in the car, the time it took to get there was worth it.  I think you will say the same about the experience the Cisco AnyConnect for the iPhone enables.

The storage industry has a very specific view of the networking protocols – they expect the network to be extremely reliable, either by making it lossless or by using a transport protocol (TCP + embedded iSCSI checksums) that was only recently made decently fast.

Some of their behavior can be easily attributed to network-blindness and attempts to support legacy protocols that were designed for a completely different environment 25 years ago, but we also have to admit that the server-to-storage sessions are way more critical than the user-to-server application sessions.

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog

The debate whether the DCB standards are complete or not and thus whether FCoE is a standard-based technology are entering the metaphysical space (just a few more blog posts and they will join the eternal angels-on-a-hairpin problem), but somehow the vendors are not yet talking about the real issues: when will we see the standards implemented in shipping products and will there be a need to upgrade the hardware.

Read more ... (yet again @ etherealmind.com)

I’m reading about a 24-year-old who started a computer skills business in his bedroom and now has three training centers. This isn’t in the San Jose Mercury News, though. It’s in Kenya’s Daily Nation and the young man in question, Stephen Orioki, is more than your average entrepreneur.

As the head of a tech training business in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest shanty towns, he is not so much worried about venture capital as whether he will get through the day without a power cut. His launch pad was the Cisco Networking Academy, which has been training Kiberans since 2007.

We all know that IPv6 deployment is a chicken-and-egg problem: Service Providers are slow to adopt IPv6 (there are some notable exceptions, including Comcast) because they can’t charge for it and the content providers don’t care because there are no IPv6 customers.

My good friend Jan Žorž got a great idea during the Google IPv6 Implementers Conference and finally managed to write it down: all we need is a slight search engine preference for sites reachable over IPv4 and IPv6. A small well-publicized tweak in Google’s scoring algorithm would push the content providers toward IPv6 and force web hosting companies to roll out IPv6 support immediately.

Today, in East Rutherford, NJ, USA, the New Meadowlands Stadium showcased innovative new stadium technologies designed to seamlessly transform the look and feel of the venue to host both New York Football Giants and New York Jets games, as well as other sporting and entertainment events.  The New Meadowlands is implementing technologies from Cisco and Verizon to offer stadium sports fans and entertainment followers leading-edge custom digital video and wireless content,  showcasing one of the most technologically advanced and memorable experiences in sports and entertainment.  See Cisco press release here.

CNBC dubbed this this the “$1.6B Smart Stadium” and interviewed Cisco CEO John Chambers, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg and New Meadowlands Stadium President & CEO Mark Lamping.

Almost a year ago I wrote a blog post listing various enterprise networking devices from Cisco lacking IPv6 support. As Jessica Scarpati found out (quoting, among other sources, my articles), not much has changed in the meantime and Cisco is not the only myopic company. For example, according to her article, Riverbed spokesman has “declined a request to discuss how the WAN optimization vendor will help customers with IPv6 migrations, saying the company was not ready to speak publicly about its strategy.” No wonder enterprises are not rushing to join the IPv6 crowd (although there’s no excuse for not having an IPv6-enabled public web site).

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog

All good things must come to an end…or at least, in the case of IT equipment, come to a point when they stop working or are no longer needed. It is part of the business plan that often times does not get the attention it should, according to a recent Forrester study commissioned by Cisco. 

The study took an in-depth look at how 300 European businesses with over 3,000 employees manage their end-of-life IT assets. The conclusion: companies need to do a better job in this area – put bluntly, the end-of-life management process is a financial, regulatory and brand reputation liability. 

While the study was done in Europe it can be used as an indicator of how companies are prioritizing, or not, end-of-life IT management globally.

Two interesting QoS-focused posts from last week: Brad Hedlund was explaining the difference between UCS and HP Virtual Connect QoS (short summary: one does queuing, the other one rate-limiting) and Russell Heilling nicely described the QoS problems encountered in a Service Provider network (he’s coming to the same conclusion as I did: we need per-user queuing, but describes it way more eloquently).

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog

The CFO magazine has recently published a FUDful article “Trouble Looms for Company Websites” (read it to see what CFOs have to deal with). Obviously, some people think it’s a good idea to throw FUD at CFOs to get the budget to implement IPv6. Long term, it’s a losing strategy; your CFO will become immune to anything coming from the IT department and ignore the real warnings.

Yes, it's time to make your content reachable over IPv4 and IPv6, more so if you’re in the eyeballs business. Google knows that. So does Facebook. Twitter doesn’t seem to care. Maybe because they’re not selling ads?

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog

Brian Johnson started a lively “I don’t need no stinking firewall” discussion on NANOG mailing list in January. I wanted to write about the topic then, but somehow the post slipped through the cracks (thank you, Pavel, for a kindly reminder!) ... and I’m glad it did, as I’ve learned a few things in the meantime, including the (now obvious) fact that no two data centers are equal (the original debate had to do with protecting servers in large-scale data center).

First let’s rephrase the provocative headline from the discussion. The real question is: do I need a stateful firewall or is a stateless one enough?

Read more in Cisco IOS Hints and Tricks blog