Make The World A Better Place – Simplify and Automate Your Data Center

Last week, I wrote about Cisco’s SDN Strategy for the Data Center. I’d like to follow that up with 2 comments today.

A reminder of the fact that we’ll be doing a webinar tomorrow on this topic, and

A general observation regarding SDN making the world a better place (don’t roll your eyes yet.  There’s beer involved.  Well, kind of. Read on…)

The webinar is called “How To Simplify and Automate Your Data Center With Cisco’s SDN Strategy” and its tomorrow, September 15, 2015 at 10am PST. You can register here. We’ll spend a few minutes talking about ACI, then much of the time on Programmable Fabric and Programmable Networks. As the webinar name would imply, we’ll cover some cool tools that help make your life easier, if you have something to do with deploying and operating networks in a data center. We’ll have at least one demo and relate the technology back to some use cases, showing how SDN can be applied in practical ways.

As you consider the evolution of SDN over the past few years, its more or less gone from this thing with a limited definition (separation of control plane from data plane, etc.) that was kind of a solution looking for a problem, to a more loosely defined set of capabilities that are having real impact. There are still folks who define as SDN as “Still Does Nothing”, but I think that – even if you wipe away the hype from the media, analysts, vendors, etc. – SDN is making business more effective and helping make peoples lives better. I’m not talking like feeding the hungry, creating global peace type “make peoples lives better”.

I’m talking about the fact that most jobs have a certain amount of stuff that is cool/interesting/challenging/fun and another part that, well, just has to get done. The part that can be boring/laborious/mind numbing. A long time ago, I used to run a network. I would copy and paste configs from one box, make a few changes to IP addresses, or interface numbers, or ACLs, or maybe route redistribution metrics, or whatever – and paste them to another box. Rinse, repeat.   Many times. This was tedious stuff. And for the most part, not very interesting. Any activity with a lot of copy and pasting is probably better done by a machine than a human. But a lot of people are still running their networks in pretty much the same way.

There is a better way. SDN can help you minimize the ‘just have to get it done’ part of your job, so you can spend more time on stuff that is impactful and engaging. We will dig into this more tomorrow. So, maybe you won’t be displacing Mother Theresa, but you can make your world a better, more cool/interesting/challenging/fun place.  And have more time to drink beer.  Or do whatever it is you like to do.  In any case, I hope you can be there.