Tag Archives: live

CiscoLive! Melbourne – 2016

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Having to miss last years edition I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this years CiscoLive! conference in my hometown Melbourne again. Venue was excellent as usual. MCEC provides perfect facilities and is in the heart of the city so no dramas here.

The opening keynote already showed to direction where Cisco has steered the ship. Datacentre agility to cope with the ever increasing demand for business flexibility and be able to adapt quickly to changes in market conditions.

Cisco is acknowledging that it needs to adjust their products and services portfolio in such a way business can still use its entire catalog but by opening up the methodologies in which these products are used it gives more control and choice to the people who have to design, implement and operate these infrastructures. This way they don’t need to align their internal processes to the ever more diverse product-set but the other way around.

One example is NX-OS. The operating system running the core of Cisco’s networking products. With the introduction of NX-OS 7 on the Nexus 7000 and the new 9000, the operating system has “rebranded” itself to “Open NX-OS”. This doesn’t mean Cisco has put the source on Github but it gives a more accessible method of interacting with the switches, or any other supported platform for that matter. By providing a rich REST-full API it’s easy to create programs, tools and scripts which can automate deployment and day-to-day operations.

Evidence of this is the fact that Cisco had set up an entire track for developers in the form of a, so called “DevNet zone”. An area at the conference where developers, or anyone interested, could learn more about developing scripts and tools to better interact with the wide portfolio Cisco has. This was not only restricted to the conference. Cisco has ramped  up a large online devnet area including a impressive sandbox where developers can test and validate their programs towards the majority of Cisco technology. As you may have seen this is not new and the methodology is more or less adopted from the OpenSource communities around the worlds where this has been created. Distributed development of software by coding, peer review, testing, building and deploying has been done for over two decades and even long before that in the educational institutions.

A lot of Cisco teams and individuals contribute in the form of code, documentation, examples and a myriad of hints and tips to get you started.

Obviously Cisco is no philanthropic organization so don’t expect any non-cisco technologies to be covered. Even when you think you see Cisco’s involvement in a non-cisco product or code, like for example OpenStack, a lot of code is contributed in the form of Cisco enablement in that product. No problem here, all vendors do that and it increases the usability and experience of the overall product.

I must applaud Cisco for embracing the way IT is used these days and give customers more control in the way they want to use Cisco products. This really is the way forward and all vendors should adopt this methodology and provide resources in the form of knowledge, product resources and people. Other companies like EMC with {code} and IBM’s Developerworks provide a similar experience

CiscoLive! 2016 covered a lot more topics like security, wireless, communications etc. etc.

Another great feat was I got to see a few friend again. Dr J Metz finally made it to Australia and David Jansen who’s sessions I always enjoy for its pragmatic approach and technical depth. Great to see you guys again.

All in all another excellent conference where I learned a lot and provide me with a significant bag of information to keep me busy for another year.

Thanks Cisco.

 

 

Cisco Live

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For the past two years I’ve attended Cisco Live here in my hometown Melbourne. I must admit that it is one of the best organized events I’ve been to. Not only is there a huge diversity in technology and solutions presented but you can also check out the broad ecosystem of Cisco partners. If you have anything to do with networking, datacenter solutions, IT security, cloud etc I would certainly recommend you get a ticket and check it out.

For my techno colleagues I would advise to attend the Technology Seminars on day one. If you want to deep-dive into one of the tracks, which are presented by well established engineers, you really need to check these out. Cisco Live also provides the presence of Cisco TAC. They have been extremely helpful to me last year so my hats of to them. If you have a very specific question or problem then please go to one of the guys in the “Meet the Expert” section on the showground in the World of Solutions expo hall. In some occasions I’ve seen that people start a discussion around their specific problem during a general presentation, that’s not the way to go. The “Meet the Expert” provides you one-on-one time with the guys who handle your issues for a living on a day to day basis so you can start your whiteboard sessions there. they can even show you specific configuration options and parameters which you might not have thought of.

If your into putting your money where your mouth is and obtain the accreditation of Cisco to become a certified engineer than definitely goto Cisco Live. You get a 75% discount on your certification exams which gives your boss even more incentive to provide you a ticket. Make sure you register beforehand because the enrolment cannot be done on the spot.

As a courtesy Cisco does provide (almost) all sessions online at Cisco Live 365. Obviously you miss the interaction but at least you get the presentation slides.

As for some feedback to Cisco for next events it would be great if there were small and short brainstorm sessions where Cisco partners can discuss their solutions with patrons. I know they present their stuff in the small sections of the show ground but this is always some sort of one-way monologue provided by marketing people. Partners like Fluke, Redhat or some of the physical infrastructure providers could be given the ability to dive into technical discussion sessions for those who are interested and discuss amongst peers about these solutions.

Hope to see you there.

Kind regards,

Erwin

Cisco Live 2013 – Datacenter mobility is the name of the game

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Always being interested in datacenter technologies you can’ t walk around Cisco. Their reach into many aspects of the datacenter in addition to the various access paths to those datacenters is significant. From high-end switching technologies to secure VPN access to wireless they are everywhere.

The name of the game for the last couple of years was primarily convergence and it turns out they have embarked on that path full steam and they haven’ t looked back. A natural followup on this is mobility. Not from you or me running around with an iPhone but more towards entire virtual datacenters. The goal is to have VM mobility between private, hybrid and public clouds without service interruption. The ability to do this allows companies to fluently move services from their internal datacenters to the likes of Amazon, MS Azure, Rackspace and the likes but also to the less well known service providers.

From the service providers perspective the obvious suspects are in many cases the larger telco’s like Vodaphone, Verizon, Telefonica, AT&T etc. but also the entire managed services companies who own and operate datacenters fit very well into that goal. CSC, IBM and HP are some companies who fit in this space.

What you see is that networks will virtually extend from the private cloud (ie your own equipment) into the public space where it will act under your own security, operations and management policies. Of course this requires a fair chunk of work upfront to determine if these policies align with the services the public cloud provide can offer but when you have this ironed out the transition to datacenter mobility should be fairly seamless.

Obviously this doesn’t come for free and many of the features and functions requires up-to-date firmware on similar up-to-date hardware. So when your equipment is up for renewal you might want to have a serious look if this datacentre mobility aligns with your business outlook for the near future and act accordingly.

Another aspects which you have to take into account is which platform you select for being your private cloud stack. Do you use MS Windows 2012, Openstack, VMware or another one. You might feel very comfortable with VMware but if your preferred cloud provider is doing OpenStack you obviously have some decisions to make.

Besides pricing you also need to take into account product maturity and backing. If you found some very funky “cloud”  software on SourceForge which does all that you want from an internal services perspective you’ll likely end up at a dead-end when you want to take your VM’ s to a public cloud.
As an example VirtualBox comes to mind. Although it do a lot of things you want from a hypervisor, (cloning, snapshots, GUI & CLI management)  it doesn’t talk with anyone so seamless migrations, disaster recovery and extended network functionality such a vSwitches and VM mobility is out of the question.

Another hot topic is of course network fabric services. In this field you see Cisco moving FibreChannel characteristics to their Ethernet platforms. Some things we’ve raken for granted in the storage space for over 2 decades you now see dripping down into the ethernet platforms. vPC and FabricPath are good examples of that. From a competitive perspective it looks like Cisco is doing the opposite of Brocade where you see Brocade adopting Ethernet technologies into their FC platforms. The result is the the same (or at least similar). It now depends on the overlaying management stacks to find out which one will suit you best.

It would be great to see where Cisco takes this in 12 months from now and hopefully we see some great stuff which are mature enough to be deployed in production environments then.

To close I’d say: Kudos Cisco. Exciting stuff popping out of the labs. For customers who are about to renew  their datacenter equipment I’d advise to thoroughly look around and determine if, and how, you could deploy these new and exiting technologies.

Cheers,
Erwin van Londen

DISCLAIMER : Cisco paid the admittance to the event but had no influence in my view depicted above.