Cisco Live Milano……..IPv6, Spaghetti and Innovation

Last week was “that time of year again”: Cisco Live Europe !! One of my favourite weeks of the working year when (together with 11,000 other Networking Professionals from over 110 countries) I packed my bag and boarded a plane for what I always affectionately call the “Cisco Live Zoo“.

My major “personal stake” is as the “co Session Group Manager” for the IPv6. This means that (together with my colleague Eric Vyncke) we are jointly responsible for all “IPv6 Content” which includes Breakout presentations, Technical Seminars, show infrastructure and the World of Solutions exhibition floor.

This year our breakout sessions have reached over 1600 attendees and the feedback we are seeing looks as if people have had a great time and learned a lot from our IPv6 speakers. Many thanks to all speakers and attendees for a great content track. I personally took a role as a speaker in the IPv6 Techtorial: Advanced Practical Knowledge for Enterprises Deploying IPv6

I was also lucky enough to be invited to participate as a member of a very interesting IPv6 Panel which discussed the question of whether the time is now right to move towards an “IPv6 only / IPv6 centric infrastructure”. Our panel was very ably supported by

Alain Fiocco (Cisco)

Gert Doering (SpaceNet)

Jen Linkova (Google)

Patrick Grossetête (Cisco)

Tore Anderson (Redpill Linpro)

Some of the more interesting quotes that we heard from this panel included:

Gert: “running a network dual stack causes lots of extra effort”

Jen: “One Network is Better Than Two”

Tore presented his approach to running IPv6 only Data Centres and showed how to enabled this with Cisco IOS XE and Patrick explained how with the use of MAP technology Cisco have enabled a large Electricity Distribution company to deploy “IPv6 only SmartMeters” alongside legacy devices that not only cannot support IPv6 but actually have no support for IP at all.

My colleague Andrew Yourtchenko was once again leading the way in the Cisco Network Operations Centre (NOC) supporting both ‘Dual Stack’ on the show WiFi and featuring an IPv6 only SSID. The results of his work can be clearly seen in the statistics we gathered from the NOC:

http://2015.ciscolive-ipv6.com/munin/ipv6noc/ipv6noc/index.html

The main point we noted from these figures was the rise in IPv6 attached devices to 90% (up from 80% in 2014)

The other major part of the IPv6 / Cisco Live Program that I personally drive is what we call the “IPv6 Enabled” program in the World of Solutions. This is all about highlighting whether a particular platform is IPv6 capable AND HAS BEEN ENABLED FOR IPv6.

In 2014 I had run the same program:

http://blogs.cisco.com/getyourbuildon/touching-seeing-and-feeling-ipv6-in-the-world-of-solutions-at-cisco-live-milan/

I sent out advanced warning to exhibitors that I was running this program (for the second year running) and told them that if they enabled IPv6 and could demonstrate that to attendees then they would qualify for an “IPv6 Enabled” logo:

‘Armed’ with my box of badges and camera I reached the Exhibition Hall around 08:00 on Tuesday morning (around 2 hours before the show opens to the public). I already had a list of some names of Partners and colleagues from Cisco who had told me that they would be IPv6 enabling their demonstrations and my job was to badge them and “find the rest”. I spent the next 8 hours walking from booth to booth with a discussion that went various ways:

“Are you showing a demonstration on your stand and does it visualise an IP component in any way ?”

“No we are not running any demonstration” or “No our solution runs above the IP layer and no IP addresses are visible in our demonstration”.

….or:

“Yes we do visualise IP in our running demonstration”

“In that case do you show IPv6 running ?”

“IPv6 is not currently supported on our platform”

or

“Yes we support IPv6….look here in our data sheet…or look here where the CLI shows you how you can enable it”

None of the above responses qualified for an “IPv6 Enabled” sticker. I responded in each case with a brief explanation about the fact that there are no more IPv4 addresses left and that in 2015 IPv6 really ought to be “Centre Stage” in all such demonstrations with a brief visit to the 6lab stats portal.

These exchanges always ended with my leaving my business card and asking them to please come back to me when they had enabled IPv6 and telling them that I was looking forward to seeing this in San Diego in June. I was actually delighted by the fact that some partners actually contacted me overnight on Tuesday night to let me know that they had actually enabled their demonstrations and could I please return with my badges. I was delighted to agree.

In many other cases I was pleased to find that IPv6 was enabled as an intrinsic part of the demonstration:

Partner IPv6 Enabled Demonstrations

British Telecom

Infoblox (Gian Carlo Palmieri and Mara Bisti)

Paessler (Konstantin Wolff)

Arbor Networks (Kiril Kassavchenko)

Ixia

Mida Solutions (Ronny Tiotto)

Netformix (Gidon Leizer and Robert Hall)

Packet Design (Angela Reyna and Peter Frame)

SevOne (Matt Goldberg)

Wild Packets (Linus Brand)

PRTG (Konstantin Woff)

Isarflow

Tiger Communications (Phillip Smith)

Men and Mice (Dagmar L. Hilmarsdottir and Martin Metz)

Plixer

InfoVista

Cisco IPv6 Enabled Demonstrations

Autonomic Networks

IoE/ IoT

Wireless Lan Controller

Connected Cities

Connected Transportation

ISR / TrustSec

Cat6K / VSS

Segment Routing

iOAM6

Photos of many of the “happy exhibitors” are at this link:

https://cisco.box.com/ciscolive-2015-IPv6-WoS

I look forward to repeating the award of the “IPv6 Enabled” logos in San Diego at Cisco Live US.

Indeed I would like to challenge every one of my Cisco colleagues and our Partners who will be in the San Diego WoS to reach out to me in advance of the show and tell me that they will be qualified for the program in June and will be enabling. We expect to find many many more IPv6 enabled platforms and demonstrations and look forward to presenting many more badges and meeting old friends and new again in 5 months time.