15 MORE USEFUL CISCO SITES In our never ending effort to uncover the most useful sites for Cisco users, we've

come up with 15 more!

It seems there are more and more sites either devoted to Cisco itself or to a market

it’s focused on and heavily invested in.

Tech Field Day chronicles the field trips of bloggers, freelance writers, podcasters and

other IT thinkers and writers to the headquarters of IT product vendors to discuss hot

topics of the day, and to share thoughts and opinions. The Tech Field Day cast usually

brings out frank and often passionate positions of the IT vendors on various topics,

such as how Cisco really feels about the OpenFlow software-defined networking

protocol.

Speaking of SDNs, Network Heresy is a blog written by OpenFlow inventor and

VMware/Nicira Chief Network Architect Martin Casado, his associates at VMware,

and a host of other industry luminaries like JR Rivers at Cumulus Networks and Alex

Bachmutsky at Ericsson. Network Heresy chronicles the network reformation among

us, such as the advent of SDN, network virtualization, OpenFlow, programmable

networks, whitebox switching, merchant silicon and the like – all threats to Cisco’s

incumbency and legacy. Here you will learn from the people who have Done It

Differently, how to demolish the “vertically integrated network model.”

This SDN stuff just will not go away. The OpenDaylight Project site is one way for IT

professionals to keep tabs on what Cisco, IBM and a bunch of other vendors are

doing to create an open source, multivendor SDN framework. The project was

founded by Cisco and IBM but there is some suspicion that it was created to keep the

hardware agnosticism of SDN and momentum of OpenFlow in check. Time will tell if

it results in anything relevant for the industry – or if it was just a smokescreen or

diversion all along.

One of the organizations watching OpenDaylight with interest is the Open

Networking Foundation, a user-driven initiative to standardize OpenFlow-based SDNs,

and share implementation guidelines and best practices based on it. Cisco is a

member of ONF because some of its largest customers are, but also because it will

help Cisco keeps tabs on the progress of OpenFlow-based SDNs in large shops, like

Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Verizon. ONF also expressed some reservations about

the motives of OpenDaylight as well…

SDN is one disruptive trend in the networking and IT industry. Another is the

consumerization of IT. Cisco has identified and addressed this trend. And so have we

here at IDG Enterprise with the CITEworld site. CITEworld covers the mobile

revolution reshaping the workplace, including BYOD policies and best practices, and

the enterprises injecting the workplace with consumer-like experiences, like cloud

services and mobile apps for collaboration, enterprise social networking, and social

marketing. The site also provides tips and techniques for developers looking to jump

on the consumerized IT trend.

Cisco has its sights set on becoming the No. 1 IT company in the industry.

The DaniWeb IT discussion community site might help Cisco address IT customer

challenges by divulging issues practitioners are dealing with. DaniWeb is an online

community of over 1 million IT professionals and over a million forum posts, and is

growing at the rate of nearly 1,000 new members daily, the site states. It’s intended

to serve as a one-stop information and advice community on just about every IT

topic there is.

There is perhaps no more important topic in IT than security. And one of the ways to

keep up on the latest security threats and remedial techniques is by reading

theSecurity-Database site. Operated by European security experts,

Security-Database’s mission is to help enterprises detect and avoid any security risks

that may impact the IT infrastructure and business applications. Authors of the site

also develop software designed to help enterprise IT anticipate, in real-time, and

resist any attack on key information assets.

While we’re on the topic of security, the Homeland Security News Wire is a good

way to keep up to date on the latest cybersecurity and infrastructure security news,

alerts and advice. In addition to the latest news and alerts, the site provides

background information on a new technology or product, analysis of business or

policy trends in homeland security, and information on key grants, contracts and new

regulations regarding homeland security, including how these events relate to

IT.Homeland security is a big issue for data centers, where Cisco wants to establish its

IT foothold.

DatacenterDynamics serves up a virtual repository of information on the evolving

compute environment and its opportunities, tailored specifically to those who design,

build, operate and troubleshoot them. It divides data center content up into

digestible zones and complements that with news, blogs, whitepapers, archived

video, etc.

Another must read for data center operators is Data Center Knowledge. DCK

provides daily news on the high-density computing industry and is also targeted at IT

and operations professionals who build and manage data centers. The site was

founded by Rich Miller, who’s been reporting on data centers since 2000. Content is

contributed by former data center operators and designers.

Convergence is a huge trend in data centers. On a larger scale, Converge! Network

Digest wraps its head around the convergence of wired, wireless and optical. With

daily and archived news stories, company directories, conference and industry group

listings, Digest serves as a portal to networking industry resources on the Web.

Converge! Network Digest used to be called ATM News Digest when it was published

by Madge Networks in the 1990s. Madge spun it off to Founding Editor James Carroll

in 1997.

India is important to Cisco and its presence is expanding there. Opportunity may be

too. One way to keep up with IT in India is CIOL, a business technology resource and

community. CIOL’s content is designed to help large and mid-market enterprises

evaluate technologies and understand its business impact. The site has an audience

of over 4 million, free access to white papers and is part of a network of Indian IT

sites operated by speciality media giant CyberMedia.

Another useful IT site is TechRepublic, published by CBS Interactive. TechRepublic has

blogs, community forums, vendor white papers, software downloads, Webcasts and

research sourced from original content by IT professionals and a community of peers

and vendors. The site is designed to help IT decision-makers identify technologies

and strategies to streamline business processes and improve service delivery.

For the technology generalist and/or investor there’s theBloomberg site. Bloomberg

and its business of technology coverage provide late breaking news on events

pertinent to Cisco, IT and the industry in general. Investigative pieces have uncovered

some interesting behind-the-scenes looks inside Cisco and some of the other heavy

hitters in IT.

Like its competitor Bloomberg, Reuters is on-the-spot with breaking technology news

and business-oriented analysis of the IT industry. Reutershas broken several Cisco

stories before anyone and expands coverage with in-depth follow ups on the

business of IT and its largest, most important players.

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