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.

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.

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

A necessary starting point in the discussion is agreeing that a VoIP should provide better performance and reliability than the traditional PBX that it replaces, and doing that means not cutting corners. When there is a problem with power in the building, a traditional PBX will continue to power the phones for at least a few minutes, and more if there is a good size UPS connected to the PBX in the phone room. The VoIP phone system should have that same capability, which means that IP phones should not be powered by plugging them into wall power but should instead be powered by the Ethernet cable that also connects them to the network, and that the Local Area Network (LAN) switches that power the phones have large enough UPS’s of the right type to power all the phones connected to them. PoE switches are also used to power phones, security cameras, wireless access points, and security systems, which makes it even more important to get the power planning correct!

Regular LAN switches that do not provide PoE use about 50 Watts of power. 24 and 48 port PoE switches can use anywhere from 400 to 1200 Watts of power, depending on the model and on the devices plugged into their ports. Most IP phones use around 8 Watts of power, so it is common for a 48 port PoE switch to be rated at around 400 Watts. As IP phones add video cameras and screens to them, the power requirements go up to about 16 Watts per phone. If less than half of the 48 switch ports are going to be used for powered devices, then a 400 Watt switch is fine, but if it is a dense deployment, more powerful switches should be used.

LAN switches are usually powered by 120 Volt AC power from regular wall outlets. This AC power is converted to DC power in the switch as efficiently as possible, and is usually split out into 3, 5, 12, and 48 Volt busses. The 48 Volts DC is what is used to power the VoIP phones. Because Ethernet can be extended to 100 meters, or about 300 feet, the PoE specification requires that there is enough power at the end of the Ethernet run to power a device. DC power is safer than but not as efficient as AC power, and over a long thin cable run there is a loss of voltage and a loss of power. For example, if 48 VDC is supplied at the switch, then at the end of 100 meters of Cat 5e cable the voltage will have dropped to about 41 VDC. The IEEE 802.3af specification requires a minimum voltage of 44 volts at the output of the switch, which means the device that uses DC power provided by PoE expects no less than 37 VDC. If the AC power supplied to the LAN switch was a constant 120 VAC, then there would be no problem, but that is not always the case.

Electricity supplied to a building can vary quite a bit. There are three main types of UPS’s: Offline, Line-Interactive, and Online. They each use different technology to accomplish the result of providing power to the devices that are plugged into them, but go about it in different ways. The problem with some of the technologies is that if the voltage to the LAN switch drops below a certain value like 110VAC, the DC power provided by PoE to the phones at the end of the longer Ethernet cabling runs will drop below 37 VDC, and the phones will either reboot or just act buggy.

• Offline UPS‘s pass the wall power directly from the input to the output, until the wall power drops below a certain value, for example 107 VAC. At that point an internal switch flips and the output power is provided from a battery and inverter. This works reasonably well in a loss of power situation, although the power drop will cause remote phones to reboot right when they are needed the most.
• Line-Interactive UPS‘s will compensate for wall power voltage fluctuations by using a transformer to modify the AC voltage. For example, if the wall power drops to 113 VAC, the UPS will transform the AC voltage up to 123 VAC. It can do this until the wall power drops too low to provide enough current for rated power, at which point it switches over to battery power just like the offline UPS.
• Online UPS‘s are set up differently because they do not use a switch to change over to a battery. Instead the AC power is converted to DC, then the DC is converted back to AC. The full time double conversion requires more expensive components, but it gives some significant advantages. The first is that the output voltage is always 120 VAC with constant frequency of 60 Hz. The second is that additional batteries can be easily added to the DC bus, allowing the UPS to provide backup power for hours at rated load.

Online UPS’s are the right kind of UPS’s to use when LAN switches with PoE are used to power phones and other network connected devices because they provide reliable power at the proper voltage and frequency. And because the double conversion system is always in use, when there is a loss of AC wall power, there is no additional strain on the UPS and it keeps functioning reliably. Offline and line-interactive UPS’s put a different system into use right when it is needed the most, and there is possibility of the internal switch and battery system failing when put under sudden stress.

UPS’s are not expensive compared to the rest of a VoIP system, but unless they are budgeted for during the planning process they tend to be overlooked. When the UPS planning is done for the access closets, it is also important to make sure there is enough electrical power to the closets. A typical 20 Amp dedicated circuit at 120 VAC can provide about 2400 Watts of power, which sounds like a lot, if the circuit is truly dedicated to the closet. But if you are planning on putting more than five 400W switches in a closet, there is a good chance that the power to the closet has to be upgraded as well.

A single UPS can usually provide 5-15 minutes of power at full load. If the disaster plan requires that PoE powered equipment be operable for longer than that, battery packs should be added to the UPS.

Finally, batteries on UPS’s wear out and will need to be replaced every 3 to 5 years. If it is not part of the disaster preparation plan to manually check every switch closed for UPS’s that have warning lights for failed batteries, it would be prudent to connect the UPS’s to the network and monitor them with power monitoring software.

Adcap recommends Liebert UPS’s by Emerson Network Power. A list of available Liebert Online UPS‘s and pricing is available at VoIP UPS.

Author: Rolf Versluis

Posted at Adcap Tech Tips

Traditional blade servers have redundant power supplies and server blades in them. They also have system controllers, SAN cards, and LAN cards. These cards all connect the individual blades to the outside world, and since the blade server has to be reliable, the cards are usually redundant. That means each chassis has two controllers, two LAN, and two SAN cards.

Cisco did something fundamentally different with the UCS. They took the controller, LAN, and SAN connections and put them into a special box called a Fabric Interconnect. Each UCS chassis only has power supplies and server blades in it, and the dual Fabric Interconnects can connect anywhere from 8 to 16 chassis with good data throughput. That means that a company deploying Cisco UCS does not have to buy two controllers, two SAN cards, and two LAN cards for those 8 chassis, but just have to hook them up to the two Fabric Interconnects.

The Fabric Interconnects are the connection from the Unified Computing System to the rest of the datacenter. It has 10G ethernet ports to connect to the core LAN, and 8GB Fibre Channel ports that connect to the SAN. Everything outside the system is compatible with almost any brand of switch or storage. In many cases the organization also deploy Cisco Nexus switches, but it is not required.

Cisco designed other things into the Unified Computing System that makes it attractive for people that manage many racks of servers. All the fixed hardware information of the blades are programmable, so applications that are tied to MAC addresses or other specific features of a server can be migrated from one  server to another, even if server virtualization is not being used. If the server is running a hypervisor, the network card can be set up to virtually split up the blade’s dual 10G ports into multiple connections, which is necessary to properly operate a virtual environment.

The other major technical accomplishment that permits this revolutionary design is the full adoption of FCoE, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet, within the confines of the Unified Computing System. All the storage and network traffic from the blades to the Fabric Interconnects goes over FCoE, which is a combination of regular Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic encapsulated within jumbo Ethernet frames. The storage traffic gets where it needs to go because Cisco uses Quality of Service mechanisms to prioritize the Fibre Channel traffic. At the Fabric Interconnects, the Ethernet and Fibre Channel are decoupled, and the storage traffic gets onto the Fibre Channel SAN just like it would from any other server.

There are actually storage manufacturers that are shipping FCoE interfaces on their storage arrays, allowing organizations to move away or not deploy a separate Fibre Channel SAN at all. This is the Unified Fabric that Cisco Nexus switches are optimized for, and permits even better performance and further cost savings.

Cisco has reached 10,000 customers for the UCS because they created a new design with proven technology that significantly lowers the cost deploying multiple blade server chassis. They also made the system easier to manage, and added lots of little details that add up to a product that is notably better than the chassis blade systems that have traditionally been deployed.

Here is a video that I made last explaining the big picture differences of the Cisco Unified Computing System:

Author: Rolf Versluis

Posted at Adcap Network Systems

What I mostly use my tablets for is immediate access to email, contacts, and calendar. I also use them for reading books in the Kindle App, blogs in the RSS reader, and  articles and other posts in the browers. I create blogs in the WordPress app, and sometimes I will create text documents in QuickOffice HD then transfer them to my desktop with Dropbox, and at other times jot down notes in SpringPad which then synchronizes over the web. The only way I have been effective at using the tablet when creating a lot of text is with an external bluetooth keyboard. I have found that the Logitech Tablet Keyboards specifcally designed for the iPad and the Android 3+ are the best.

I have been very frustrated using the browsers on the tablets. It is difficult to enter text in fields. There is no mouse hover capability, so a link has to be selected in order to see what it does. Pages don’t resolve correcty in the browser, and the iPad does not support Flash, which is still used on many websites. Basically, when I try to get work done using the browsers on the tablet, I have to stop because it is very difficult.

Even though QuickOffice HD has also improved significantly in the last six months, it is not the equivalent of the Microsoft Office Suite. For reading and creating basic documents, it works well. Unfortunately much of my work does not involve basic documents. I have to read Word docs that are redlined and commented, and I have to work with with spreadsheets that are large, have multiple tabs, and complex formulas. Neither of those work well in QuickOffice HD.

So to get around the browser and application limitations, when I really have to get something done and all I have is a tablet I use the VMware View client to log in to my main desktop, which is a virtual desktop running on the servers at our datacenter. When I am using that I have access to the full Microsoft Office suite and can get things done. It is a PCoIP client and performance is usually pretty good. It is still much slower than accessing my virtual desktop from a laptop, though, but it is better than not being able to get access at all.

Of the three tablets I have been using, the Cisco CIUS has the best email and calendar apps of the group, and it has an outstanding telephone app and a great 720p 30 fps HD video conferencing app that hooks into our back end systems. I use both the phone and video client on a regular basis. Once I stopped trying to use tablets as devices for content creation, and thought about how I wanted to use them, I decided that the Cisco CIUS was the best one for me.

Now I have a new way of working. When out of the office and I have time to be productive, I use my CIUS as my office phone and HD video conferencing device, while creating and interacting with complex content on my laptop. In meetings, I bring my CIUS so I can quickly reference content, check email and the calendar. And at home I use the full size tablets for reading CiscoPress books in Kindle, casual web browsing, and other forms of entertainment. Tablets definitely have a place because of their convenience and adaptability, but for serious work when on the go a laptop is a necessity.

The email, calendar, and contact applications are excellent. I have mine hooked into our Exchange server, and everything works flawlessly. Emails are easy to read, and the interface layout is top notch. A really nice feature is the spelling word suggestions pop up in a line across the screen, ready for selection. The Samsung still can not get the spelling and word suggestion feature operating in the native email client, as recipients of my mis-spelled emails can attest to.

The CIUS calendar application is way better than the easily confused calendar on my HTC Incredible Android phone. All the meetings show up exactly like they do on my Outlook client, with no extra meetings, no deleted meetings, and no confusing layout. Just the meeting information that I need, layed out in both a week view as well as a scrolling agenda view. One minor issue is there is no direct link to Google maps for addresses.

Contacts are great. All the contacts you need are right there. There is a good fast search function. All my Google contracts are sitting right there alongside my Exchange contacts. After installing the LinkedIn app, it integrates pictures and contact info from LinkedIn into the contacts view as well, so that most of my contacts end up having pictures showing. What is really neat is that the contact are integrated into the phone application, which is where the Cisco CIUS really starts to differentiate itself from other Android devices.

The Cisco CIUS is a full Cisco phone. I have mine hooked into a Plantronics bluetooth headset, and have been using it from home. I just authenticated the built-in Cisco AnyConnect client to our VPN service, and it grabbed the profile from the Cisco Communications Manager server. I set up a custom button layout for the CIUS because I wanted to have one phone line and five Busy Lamp Field buttons so I could speed dial people. The voice quality is really good – Cisco must have set some kind of processing priority on the phone application.

It is of course a full 720p HD video conferencing endpoint as well. This is integrated into the phone application. External callers, EX90 users, and Movi client users can reach me by dialing either my internal extension, or my URI, which is just my phone number at my domain, 6784565740@adcapnet.com. How easy is that? I have also tested the video calls over the 4G Verizon mifi connection that I have. When using that, the video codec switches to the lower bandwidth Standard Definition automatically. Even when the video pixellates slightly, the voice stream on the video call is clear with no distortion. The only trouble I am having is switching the video to the back camera to show people stuff – that feature could be more intuitive. Voice is good both using the Plantronics headset, and using the built in speakers and microphone, with both sides of the call working well.

The Jabber and Webex clients come standard on the Cisco CIUS. They logged into my accounts no problem. The Jabber client is good for Instant Messaging and Presence now, and because everyone at my office uses Webex Connect, it is nice to sometimes have this alternate communications path, especially when I am in a meeting. Both clients are pretty basic for now, and I am looking forward to the upgrades that are coming that will integrate voice and video into them, just like their desktop counterparts. If there is one thing I have learned from owning tablets, it is to have patience with applications, since they are constantly getting usability upgrades.

The VMware View virtual desktop client is surprisingly good. I expected that it would be hard to use on a 7″ tablet. But it is just about as easy to use at the same client on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. I think the touchscreen is more sensitive or accurate on the CIUS, or maybe I am just used to figuring out where my fingerpad is going to land on the screen, but I was able to check a few different applications for information that I needed.

I have not tried any games on this tablet yet. I have no idea if there is a 3D engine or not, nor do I care. This tablet is all about business. The Cisco design team clearly put some time and effort into making the business applications work well. I know there is a bunch of security stuff and app store control stuff as well, but that has no bearing on usability.

The improvements I would like to see are around charging and battery life. The battery life is short, but part of that is because the tablet seems to be running all the time! The screen never turns off, even when it is running on battery. If I don’t manually push the power button it will happily chug away and drain the battery in a few hours. I would also like to see some little LED light up when the tablet is being charged, because one night I thought I plugged it in but didn’t, so I was not able to use it at a meeting the next day. Well, I could have, but I didn’t want to plug the power into the wall to show it off. There is no car charger available as far as I can tell – although I am going to go to Fry’s and see if there is some universal car charger that has a plug that would work for it.

The Cisco CIUS tablet is a really nice device. Even though the specs are basic (see Cisco CIUS review), those don’t tell the real story about this tablet. This has the best core business applications I have seen on any device, including the iPad2 and Droid phones. The AnyConnect, Jabber, and Webex collaboration applications are outstanding. But what really sets this device head and shoulders above any other tablet in the marketplace is the rock solid implementation of the Cisco phone and the Cisco TelePresence video. All those applications combined together have made this my first choice for the device that I reach for in my bag when I need to get things done.

Rolf Versluis

Savvy consumers are used to looking behind the free offer to see if there is a catch. No catch, but at the end of the day, we are hoping that you will buy something from us – after we have demonstrated that there is good business value to do so, of course.

One way is to work with customers that already know they have to buy something and get it going on their system. With those customers, we work to find out what the underlying requirements are, make recommendations based on our experience, and try to get them the best system that works for their needs at the best price. An example of this is for a server upgrade – in many situations, Cisco UCS servers provide the best business value, and we have experienced engineers that are able to show why that is.

Another is to introduce a relatively new technology, demonstrate how it works, and work through the numbers to show how it can save money. An example of this is the SIP trunking conversions we have done for customers since 2006. The technology works, and it can save organizations money on their monthly telecom bills, enough in some cases to pay for a voice and network upgrade. Other new technologies that can do this are Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Private Cloud deployments.

So, what can you get from Adcap for free? Here are some things:

1. A really good steak at Flemings. This is where we host most of our lunch seminars where we discuss new techology.
2. Unique technical training at our Geeknicks. This is our series of four hour technical deep dives where our design and deployment engineers show advanced configuration and troubleshooting techniques that we usually reserve for paid consulting engagements.
3. Network assessments. For certain organizations, Cisco funds an assessment and analysis by RISC Networks. The deliverable is a report analyzing actual utilization and highlights potential issues.
4. Datacenter assessments. This is similar to the network assessment, but focuses on servers, storage, and core networking.
5. IP voice and video design by a Cisco Voice CCIE. As part of our sales process, organizations may get upgrade designs at no cost from Michael Cavanaugh, CiscoPress author and experienced Solution Architect.
6. Server, storage, virtualization, security, wireless designs. Also as part of our sales process, organizations may get an upgrade design based on best practices and current industry recommendations from one of the Solution Architects on our team.
7. Network Security checkup on Internet connection. Adcap has a pool of Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls we use to check all traffic in and out of an organization’s Internet connection. All traffic is analyzed, and a comprehensive report is produced from the one-week engagement. The amount of malware typically identified is astonishing.
8. Budget numbers for your next project. Many times we work with customers to try to fit a design into a budget. It is better to get a design from us first, then use that to create a budget.
9. Advice on your next technology purchase. Before you cut that next purchase order, give us a call! We love staying up to date on the latest technology, and are always happy to give our opinion on what you are about to get.
10. Quick pricing from our online store. Sometimes you just need to check a quick price. We have full access to leading technology distributors, and have set our online store pricing low for the technologies we specialize in.
11. Opportunity to support a local business. Adcap is owned by Christine Versluis, who grew up in Georgia. Our headquarters is in Alpharetta, Georgia. We invest in the local community, support local charities, and employ fifty people in Georgia. Buy local!

Take advantage of the things that Adcap does to get the word out about how to make technology work for you in your business. The biggest Information Technology trends currently happening are Voice Over IP phone systems with SIP trunking, High Definition Desktop Video for Collaboration, Private cloud deployments using virtualization and automation, and desktop virtualization. Adcap has design, deployment, and support experts available for all these solutions.

That’s what we can do for you!

Explanation of Architecture

Hospitality Company

Summary

Brief Video Explaining How Cisco UCS is Different from Other Blade Servers