What is Cisco ACI?

Gian Paolo Boarina heard a lot about Cisco ACI at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe this year. This has come in handy since he’s been migrating traditional switches to Cisco ACI fabric. In this post, he looks at what exactly is ACI from the perspective of a different roles, including networking, security, and DevOps. Overall in working with Cisco ACI, Gian has found he’s needed less time configuring switches, and more time focusing on business intent.


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.


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.


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.


Is ACI Coming For The CLI?

Based on what Tom Hollingsworth saw at Tech Field Day Extra presentations from Cisco Live Europe, the Cisco-based CLI may be in trouble. Tom’s takeaway is that Cisco wants to use their Application-Centric Infrastructure to introduce a standard set of terms that can be used across device groups. This new standard lexicon, combined with alleviating the need to learn Python, make it an interesting approach to finally allow for the CLI to retire on Cisco gear.


Cisco Hyperflex 3.0 – A Mature Hyper-Converged Solution Ready for Next-Gen Workloads

Max Mortillaro gives his thoughts on HyperFlex 3.0, which he got a deep dive on at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. This release featured support for Hyper-V, 40 GbE networking, and self-encrypting drives. But for Max, the bigger accomplishment with the release is showing that Cisco is serious with innovating and remaining competitive with HyperFlex.


Brief Recap: Tech Field Day at Cisco Live Europe 2018

At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, Ivan Pepelnjak saw a dizzying array of presentations from Cisco, seventeen total in just two days. In this post, he breaks down some of his initial takeaways. The most memorable sessions off the bat were the Tetration dive into how they collect flow statistics in CloudScale ASICs, and Fred Niehaus’ wireless presentation. There was a lot to take in, and Ivan does a good job covering the busy event.


Revisited: The Need for Stretched VLANs

In this post, Ivan Pepelnjak revisits an old saw inspired from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe: Stretched VLANs. Ivan lays out why he’s skeptical of the need for stretched VLANs at all.


Networking Field Day @ Cisco Live

Make sure you’re following Nicola Arnoldi for all of his updates out of Tech Field Day Extra from Cisco Live Europe. It’s his first Field Day experience, so we’re looking forward to the new perspective!


My first day at Tech Field Days Extra @ Cisco Live 2018

In this post, Nicola Arnoldi shares some thoughts from Cisco Live Europe, including his first Tech Field Day Extra experience. During the presentation, Nicola got a look at Cisco’s multicloud strategy, their network assurance engine, and Tetration. That’s a lot of deep dives for the first day, but Nicola does a good job of sorting through the fire hose of information in the post.


Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2018: what news under the skies of Barcelona?

At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, Max Mortillaro to getting out of his comfort zone with Cisco. He’s familiar with their compute and storage offerings, but he’s hoping to get a deep dive into more of their core business. ACI and HyperFlex are of particular interest at this event. Be sure to follow #CLEUR18 on Twitter to catch all the updates from the delegates.


NFD17 and Tech Field Day Extra Cisco Live Europe 2018

To start the year, Dominik Pickhardt will be attending two Field Day events, heading out to Silicon Valley for Networking Field Day, then crossing the pod for Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. Make sure to follow Dominik and all the delegates on Twitter for the events using #NFD17 and #CLEUR18.