Bridging Enterprise Connectivity

In this post, Scott Lester considers some of the challenges with current connectivity approaches to the remote office. Cellular access is common, but makes it hard to maintain an enterprise security posture at all times. At Mobility Field Day last month, Cisco showed how the emergence of 5G might be the ideal solution.


Meraki’s LittleTable Isn’t So Little Anymore

Jennifer Huber heard from Cisco’s Meraki team at Mobility Field Day earlier this month. She was impressed with the responsiveness of their Wireless Heath dashboard. This allows her to view the massive LittleTable database and evaluate which client devices are behaving badly.


If Cisco Could Lower Their Marketing Hype, We Might Actually Be Able to Get to the Substance

Lee Badman wrote up about one of the major benefits of a Mobility Field Day presentation, cutting through marketing hype, and learning about the tech that matters to him as a potential customer. Lee recently had a bad experience watching recent Cisco ads, but seeing them present at Mobility Field Day earlier this year, he found their Cisco Analytics and Assurance presentation “mind-opening.”


Figuring Out What Bothers Me About Wi-Fi and “Analytics”

Lee Badman heard about a number of wireless analytics solutions at Mobility Field Day last week. But one thing stuck in his mind. Outside of the merits of any solution over another, the underlying assumption behind many was that an analytics solution was needed because the wireless network is in some way being managed poorly. For Lee, WLAN problems often come from problems in vendor code, not something an admin can really be proactive about. This isn’t to say that these analytics solutions aren’t needed, but Lee wants them put in the proper context of why WLAN problems most often arise.


Mark Your Calendars: Mobility Field Day 3

In this video, Rowell Dionicio discusses coming back for his third Mobility Field Day. He discusses what he expects to hear from each of the presenters, including Arista, who recently acquired previous presenter Mojo Networks. There are a lot of new faces on the delegate side, and Rowell is looking forward to the discussions and perspectives that they will bring.


Management Frame Detection?

Samuel Clements considers the acronym MFD. What could be better than Management Frame Detection? Mobility Field Day of course! He’s heading out to the event later this month. In this post, he reviews the announced presenters and what he expects to hear about from each. Remember, you can follow along with all presentations during the event on our live stream, and engage with the conversation on Twitter using #MFD3.


Advice To Tech Field Day Sponsors

Greg Ferro is no stranger to Tech Field Day events. In this post, he uses his considerable event experience to offer some advice to future presenting companies. He addresses everything from knowing your audience, to how to approach demos, and building a company story over the course of two hours.


Cisco’s Container Journey to the Cloud

In this piece, Tom Hollingsworth looks at the announcements from Cisco Live US 2018. What stood out to him was the prominence of a non-networking specific topic, the cloud. He specifically examines how Cisco took pains to show how they are aligned with Google’s vision of the cloud, and integrate that across their product lines.


Tech Field Day Extra Cloud Sessions at Cisco Live US

Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2018 will have a number of presentations next week, including four by Cisco. In this post, Breana Jordan previews the sessions, which will look at Cisco solutions for hybrid cloud, multicloud, and containers.


Change Doesn’t Have To Be a Four Letter Word

Change to a network inherently exposes an organization to some risk of something going wrong. John Herbert looks at Cisco’s Network Assurance Engine, and how it helps admins do testing of a change state and extensive validation to help reduce that risk, and make change much more manageable.


Field Area Networking

Cisco’s Networking Field Day presentation on Field Area Networking definitely left an impression with delegate Nick Buraglio. He’s put together a Network Collective Short Take video on the subject, as well as writing up a blog post. He excited because what he saw would provide an alternative to LTE for low power remote IoT devices.


Short Take – Cisco Field Area Networking

At Networking Field Day earlier this year, Cisco presented on field area networking. Nick Buraglio was a delegate at the event, and shares his thoughts on what he saw in this Network Collective Short Take.


Cisco Candid

Based on what he saw of Cisco’s Network Assurance Engine at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe this year, Gian Paolo Boarina wrote up a thorough post covering some of it’s capabilities and implications for network admins.


Verify, Or Die Trying: Observations on Change Management

John Herbert takes a look at the challenges of change management in a network, and how Cisco’s Network Assurance Engine can make the process much more reliable and consistent.


Security Assurance in the Data Center with Cisco Candid

In this piece, Gian Paolo Boarina takes a look at Cisco’s Network Assurance Engine, which debuted at Cisco Live Europe earlier this year. He shows how this can provide configuration and state validation as well as security compliance testing for an ACI fabric.


Describing Network Automation: Automate the Coffee

David Gee started down his road to network automation with the founding of Cisco’s DevNet developer program back at Cisco Live Europe in 2014. Since then, various metaphors have been used to introduce the idea of network automation, but David has struck on one that seems to really resonate, automate your coffee! This introduces the idea of mapping all needed dependencies, which can be used to generate a workflow.


A look at Cisco Tetration

Jasper Bongert takes a look at Cisco’s Tetration, which he got details about at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. Jasper finds it similar in intent to looking at Netflow data, getting network telemetry without keeping full packet captures. But he highlights how Tetration is designed to do this for modern network architectures.


Game of Threats with Cisco AMP

At Cisco Live Europe, Dominik Pickhardt heard from the Cisco Security group. The presentation focused on updates for AMP for Endpoints. For Dominik, Cisco distinguishes themselves with integration for other AMP systems, as well as newly announced support for iOS.


The Winds of Change From January

Tom Hollingsworth had a whirlwind last two weeks of January, leading both Networking Field Day in Silicon Valley and Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe from Barcelona. In this post, he begins to organize his thoughts on the two events, including the state of Cisco turning away from hardware, the death of the CLI in 2018, as well as the continuing importance of containers and automation.


Bringing DevOps To Routing – Cisco XR

Larry Smith got his first deep dive into Cisco XR at Networking Field Day last month. This is Cisco’s Linux-based OS that adds application and configuration management to their platforms. This piece looks at how native and Docker application hosting works on XR, as well as how it supports ZTP and iPXE.