One more great advantage of distributed architecture is it further improves the latency of time taken to invoke the EEM policy execution.

Look at its popularity it was a right move by Cisco Systems to introduce the Cisco CCT Telepresence Certification, which focuses on the on the skills required for onsite support and maintenance of Cisco TelePresence Systems. Technicians in this area must be able to identify Cisco TelePresence models, accessories, cabling, and interfaces; understand the Cisco TelePresence operating modes and identify commonly found software; and be able to use the Cisco Command Line Interface (CLI) to connect and service products and make basic Cisco TelePresence system adjustments.

The only prerequisite for Cisco CCT Telepresence Certification is Cisco CCT Routing and Switching.

For further details do check the Cisco Learning Network Website

Personally I welcome the introduction of Cisco CCT Data Center certification, especially after Cisco announced their Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000, and Nexus 2000 Series Switches which are specially designed for Data Centers. Certainly this move by Cisco System empowers the Data Center operators or Technicians to demonstrate the knowledge and ability required for the onsite support and Maintenance of Cisco Data Center Products.

The Cisco CCT Data Center Certification ensures that the certified individual have knowledge of the Cisco Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000, Nexus 2000 and MSD 9000 (SAN Switches) product line along with the basic knowledge of the NX-OS and simple commands required to perform tasks such as password recovery.

In order to be  Cisco CCT Data Center Certified the only prerequisite is to have valid Cisco CCT Routing and Switching Certification.

For further details do check the Cisco Learning Network Website

As I am working with Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000 and 2000 Series Switches, I discovered by default  Telnet Server is disabled in a NX-OS devices such as Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000 and 2000 Series Switches.

We all know Telnet protocol enables TCP/IP connections to a host. Telnet allows a user at one site to establish a TCP connection to a login server at another site and then passes the keystrokes from one device to the other. Telnet can accept either an IP address or a domain name as the remote device address.

I will show you how to enable the Telnet Server in NX-OS devices

VDC-Admin(config)# feature telnet

VDC-Admin(config)# show telnet server

telnet service enabled

VDC-Admin(config)#

We are familiar with the traditional Cisco IOS command line interface (CLI); the CLI interface of NX-OS is pretty similar to Cisco IOS.

One of the key differences I have noted is NX-OS is when you first log into NX-OS, you go directly into EXEC ode.

NX-OS features are based on license model, where as in IOS what matter was the type of IOS you installed. A good beginning from Cisco as you can install the required features, more over you can try a 120 day license grace period for testing.  After 120 days of testing the features will be automatically removed. This is some thing you never experienced in Cisco IOS.

Cisco NX-OS has the capability to either enable or disable the features OSPF, BGP, etc. by using the feature configuration command.

I will try to come up with some more details in the upcoming post.

Since we all know Cisco Systems has introduced Nexus Switches and NeXt-generation Operating System (NX-OS). I was wondering how  am  I going to configure them in our expansion project? As we are expected to have Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000 and Nexus 2000 Series Switches.

Thanks to Cisco Press soon they are releasing a title NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching which addresses the operation, use and configuration of the NeXt-generation Operating System (NX-OS) for Cisco data center products.

Picture Courtesy: Cisco Press

Currently the rough-cut pages of the title NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching are available. I just had a glance of some sample pages for some chapters.  The new title NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching has seven chapters

Chapter1: Introduction to Cisco NX-OS

Chapter 2: Layer 2 Support and Configurations

Chapter 3: Layer 3 Support and Configurations

Chapter 4: Multicast Configuration

Chapter 5: Security

Chapter 6: High Availability

Chapter 7: Serviceability

Chapter 1 deals with an Introduction to Cisco NX-OS and I liked the way sections covered in this chapter. The author starts with an overview of NX-OS and its advantages, some of the advantages of NX-OS are

Unified data center operating system

Robust and rich feature set with a variety of Cisco innovations

Flexibility and scalability

Modularity

Virtualization

Resiliency

IPv4 and IPv6 IP routing and multicast features

Comprehensive security, availability, serviceability, and management features

Currently the NX-OS platform is supported by following platforms

Nexus 7000

Nexus 5000

Nexus 2000

Nexus 1000V

Cisco MDS 9000

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCS)

Nexus 4000

Overall this title seems to very interesting and useful for the Network Administrators who are exploring their skills in the world of NX-OS. Eagerly waiting for Cisco Press to release this title in book format until then keep enjoying the rough cuts.

We are working on building a new Data Center for our Organization, mean while I did lot of research and gathered some information on what standards the data center to be established. These days everyone is talking about the green Data centers, which triggered me and I was just thinking about our planet. Yes we will plan a green data center, but to do so we need some guidelines and standards.

 I figured out an ideal data center can be only established if we follow the TIA 964 standards. Following resources helped me to come out with an ideal RFP for the tender which we are releasing soon.

First and foremost the document published by Search Datacenter is good you should have a look at this document and the website has many valuable information related to data centers.  

APC does have lot of documents, the white paper published by APC by the title “Data Center Projects: Standardized Process” did help me a lot to draft the RFP.

Cisco Systems even though they never build data center but they do provide solutions and does have a dedicated section called Cisco Data Center 3.0 where you can find lot of valuable information.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/yJkZZdhaEks" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Other web site which really amazed me was of Panduit, they really have data center solutions, especially the cable management stuff and the specially designed Net Access cabinets for the Cisco Nexus 7000 series Switches.   

Hopefully we try to establish our data center based on the TIA 964 standards and ofcourse it will be green.