The following is an excerpt from the 2020 CSR Impact Report. Q: How has Cisco taken a stand for social justice over the past year? A: In September 2020, we publicly unveiled Cisco’s Social Justice Beliefs and Our Commitment to Action. For all of us who poured our souls into creating this moment, it’s a remarkable milestone. Because it’s not just a platform for change. It’s a bridge. Connecting longstanding challenges with new possibilities for overcoming…

A switch with multiple personalities. That’s the concept behind Cisco’s new Nexus 3550-T Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) switch platform. This groundbreaking platform is the first FPGA switch with Layer 3 capabilities that can also run multiple applications ─ personalities ─ by leveraging the Cisco Firmware Development Kit (FDK). It’s also the first new Cisco switch based on the Exablaze FPGA technology from the Exablaze acquisition in February 2020. Layer 3 Switching Speedster The first…

Remember 2005? What were you doing then? Were you waiting a line for Microsoft’s recently released Xbox 360? Were you cheering for Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs as they closed out the Detroit Pistons for the NBA Championship? German Chancellor Angela Merkel assumed office as the first female Chancellor of Germany. Do you remember witnessing that? It was a pretty busy year, but if you were in the tech world back then, I’m…

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the best hyperscale performer across all areas of throughput while Microsoft Azure has the best storage systems and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has the lowest network latency. Those are the findings of a series of benchmarks performed by the atrociously named Cockroach Labs, maker of a scalable, resilient database called CockroachDB that runs on all three services. The study, part of the company’s third annual Cloud Report, evaluated the performance…

User satisfaction with Wi-Fi relies in part on whether the network supports smooth handoffs between access points as users and their devices roam about, and if the APs don’t do their job well, users will complain. The initial tendency may be to install more APs in hopes of finding an easy fix, but doing so without careful analysis can make the situation even worse. Proper roaming requires more than just good signal strength throughout coverage…