#CiscoChampion
Cisco Live – It’s All About Networking
We are just a few weeks away from what has become my favorite event of the year: Cisco Live. I’ve been attending Cisco Live consistently for the last several years and this year I will be attending as a NetVet for the first time. What has kept me coming back year after year and, this time around, on…
Upcoming Technology Trends at Cisco Live
Cisco Live in San Diego is right around the corner. It’s the place to be to meet with people, learn and to stay current with the technology trends of the industry. What are some of the upcoming technology trends to watch out for at Cisco Live. Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) There is a lot of buzz abo…
Where to learn ACI
I remember walking through Cisco Live last year in San Francisco and hearing all about ACI and the Cisco DevNet program. To be totally honest, I shrugged it off as just something that was trying to get hyped up and would not have any real impact on what I do. Well…that has changed over the las…
Importance of naming standards in Cisco Unified Communications Manager
In network engineering I have learned that the biggest lie I tell myself is that “I do not need to write this down.” That being said, when you are in the heat of troubleshooting a production issue I really try to design my systems so that I can tell what the heck something does by a label or good na…
A Tour of Cisco’s Allen Data Center
As a consultant I have seen many different ‘Data Centers’, from Co-location facilities, to in house and well thought out, to a dirty closet that no one was using. Douglas Alger gave us a tour of Cisco’s Data Center in Allen, TX about a month ago. I was expecting to be impressed and I was not disappo…
To flow or not to flow?
NetApp’s newest storage operating system, clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT), leverages a backend of Cisco Nexus switches for it’s cluster interconnect network. When configuring the switch/cluster ports for use with cDOT, the best practice is to turn flow control off as per TR-4182. In fact, th…
So You Want to be a Network Engineer. Here’s Where You Should Start!
First lets talk about what a Network Engineer is. According to The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing. Retrieved April 27, 2015, from Dictionary.com website a Network Engineer is: “A high-level LAN /WAN technician who plans, implements and supports network solutions between multiple platforms. A n…
SDN – A Cisco Champion’s perspective
Software defined networking (SDN for short) is going to be an important technology that will change the way we do networking. But what is SDN today and even more important, what is it going to be? When you start reading about SDN as a network engineer, you ask yourself what your future job will look…
4+1 Practices for Effective Lifelong IT Learning (Part 2)
Happy with how you go about learning, or wish you could learn more, learn more quickly, and even just do it? Today’s post continues what was begun in the previous post, namely a list of good practices to consider to improve how you go about learning throughout your IT career. The previous post set u…
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