In this video Max Mortillaro and Arjan Timmerman talk about Cisco Live in Barcelona 2020. They talk about Tech Field Day Extra, Cisco in general, HyperFlex, UCS and IoT. They discuss why the appreciate the unique access events like Tech Field Day Extra provide. During busy industry shows like Cisco Live, it’s one thing to hear all the announcements live. But Tech Field Day Extra provides access to experts on the announcements, and often hosts sessions going into technical deep dives on the latest technology.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco UCS Updates at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in Barcelona
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro of the TECHunplugged crew cover what they saw from Cisco UCS at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. This x86 server infrastructure has been around for a decade, and at the event, Cisco announced updates to the latest Intel processors, as well as adding in support for the AMD Rome platform, providing up to 64 cores on a processor. This processor competition coming to Cisco UCS can only spell good things for customers down the road. UCS Gen 5 also adds new support for NVMe, adds novel blade designs, and still providing GPU dense options. In the words of Arjan, Cisco is “doing something special with UCS.”
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Live Barcelona – No Love for Single Panes of Glass
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro were in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. In this video, they dig into why the single pane of glass seems to be the goal of many companies in IT, but why it can actually add to complexity for actual IT operators. They saw some companies presenting multiple panes of glass, each with specific functions, but ultimately adding to sprawl. With organizations that use solutions across a number of vendors, a single pane of glass tied to one company still requires moving to different tools. They discuss how to possibly create an “ideal” single pane of glass that taps into the API driven enterprise, and what they heard from Cisco Workload Optimizer in moving closer to that future.
Cisco Live Europe Reactions | Gestalt IT Rundown: January 29, 2020
Tom Hollingsworth was out in Barcelona for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020. As if organizing an international event wasn’t enough, he also co-hosted the Gestalt IT Rundown. This gave him an opportunity to give his live impressions of the show on their live stream. While the show didn’t have an headline product announcements that stuck out to Tom, he did think it gave a lot of interesting indicators about how Cisco is evolving their business and technology.
Captivating Wireless Connectivity With Cisco OpenRoaming
Authenticating to wireless networks should be fast and easy. But this often runs afoul of the traditional trade off between security and ease-of-use. In order to make that work, you need to build out the infrastructure to make it happen. Tom Hollingsworth takes a quick look at how Cisco is using their OpenRoaming technology to do just that, which the company presented at Mobility Field Day.
Really Late Company Christmas Shopping
As he packed for Cisco Live Barcelona, our own Tom Hollingsworth noticed something of a post-Christmas shopping spree among tech companies this year. VMware VeloCloud bought Nyansa, Arista is buying Big Switch Networks, and Tom thinks more is on the way. What’s behind this Q1 shopping spree? Tom isn’t sure!
Cisco Champion 2020
Field Day delegate Al Rasheed is excited to be named Cisco Champion for 2020 and wrote this post to thank all those who helped him achieve this, including us here at Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day. He attributes Cisco’s notice to his participation in Networking Field Day 19 in 2018 and Cisco Live Europe last year. We couldn’t be happier to watch as people like Al achieve their dreams!
Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE
Segment routing has been a familiar topic at Networking Field Day over the years. The Packet Pushers Heavy Networking podcast recently looked at the topic, digging into the latest evolution of carrier networks. Nick Buraglio was a guest on the podcast and definitely drew on his experience from the Segment Routing Field Day Roundtable during the discussion. While the technology has certainly matured over the past three years, these kinds of discussions are great for getting people up to speed, sparking a deeper interest in specialized topics, and getting to know the prominent voices in the space. Be sure to check out the episode.
Container-Based WAN Monitoring
Container-based WAN monitoring might just sounds like some IT marketing buzzword BINGO, but Pete Welcher makes the argument that it’s a vital part of a networking toolkit. Rather than traditional monitoring tools that look at metrics that indicate what a user actually excperiences on the network, companies like ThousandEyes and Netbeez user container-based monitoring to actually probe the network from the client side without needing additional hardware, able to run in contianers on a Catalyst 9000 switch, for example.
Heavy Networking 491: Real-Life Segment Routing & PCE
Back in 2016, Nick Buraglio participated in our Segment Routing Field Day Roundtable, discussing the impact the tech would have on carrier networks. On this episode of Packet Pusher’s Heavy Networking, Nick and Ethan Banks go deep into similar topics like SR-MPLS, SRv6, and PCE, as well as traffic engineering.
The Importance of User Interfaces in IT Infrastructure Management
Enrico Signoretti looks at the importance of user interface in this piece, something that in an age dominated by automation and APIs is often forgotten. He looks at the different approaches to UI on display at a recent Tech Field Day event.
Mastering the Art of Data Visualization
Data management and visualization are hot topics in IT today, but sometimes the terms can get muddied. After returning from Tech Field Day, Max Mortillaro breaks down what qualifies as visualization, how this relates to a good user interface, and more.
How Do You Provision a 500-Switch Network in a Few Days?
One of the interesting aspects of a IT event the scale of Cisco Live is that it has its own unique set of IT challenges. During a behind the scenes tour during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019, Ivan Pepelnjak got to ask how they created the network for the event in such a short amount of time. What he found was that provisioning a large campus network in a few days is easy and reliable as long as you do your homework and keep things as simple as possible.
A Better Way to Do Guest Wireless
Haydn Andrews considers what he saw from Aruba and Cisco at Mobility Field Day. Each showed how they will use existing wireless networks to fill in the cellular gap, which requires making sign on seamless. The two companies have different approaches, and Haydn breaks it down in this post.
CTS 184: Cisco @ Mobility Field Day 4
François Vergès joined us a Mobility Field Day this year, and seemed to really find a lot of interesting content. In this episode of the Clear to Send podcast, he reviews what Cisco presented at the event. They showed off their new Catalyst wireless routers and APs, which run IOS-XE. They also gave details on their latest IoT and OpenRoaming offerings. Be sure to listen to the podcast for all the details.
MFD Series: Cisco’s Modular Approach for WLCs
Manon Lessard heard extensively from Cisco at Mobility Field Day. She focused on their IoT and wireless offerings in this post. At the event, they detailed their Catalyst 9800 series of controllers, all running on IOS XE. Because this code base is modular, different system components can be updated, allowing admins more control and stability, which hopefully means they update more often.
The Contention Window: S1E13 : MFD4 Hodgepodge & Wrapup
Scott Lester and Jake Synder were both at Mobility Field Day over the summer. The event provided a wealth of information on the latest in wireless and mobility. Be sure to check out both of them on this episode of The Contention Window, where discuss what they saw at the event.
The Network Is Code: Cisco at MFD4
Cisco’s presentation at Mobility Field Day was as dense with information as Lee Badman has come to expect. But what really struct him was Cisco’s focus on “the network is code.” For Lee, this needs to imply reliable code for it to be meaningful. He appreciates that the IOS-XE code base is a long way away from Cisco’s previous wireless efforts, and he’s anxious to see continued improvements from the company.
Decoupling the WLAN
Cisco is no stranger to Field Day events, and we were thrilled to have them present recently at Mobility Field Day. At event, they looked at how their Cisco 9800 IOS XE code can help solve the constant problem of organizations not updating. In this post, Scott Lester breaks down how they do this by offering multiple upgrade options to minimize disruptions to the network.
A New Way to Onboard
In this post, Scott Lester looks at Cisco’s OpenRoaming initiative as a way to make faster handoffs from LTE to public Wi-Fi without dropping called. Scott got to see an in depth presentation on this at Mobility Field Day, and get’s into the technical details in this post.