NFD5 At Cisco Today, Speed Dating, and Voting on Topics!

Today we have an excellent lineup of speakers and demos to kick off Networking Field Day 5 – at Cisco. If you don’t know what Networking Field Day is (#NFD5 on Twitter) I basically call it “Bloggers on a Bus”. Stephen Foskett organizes these events where he gets 10 – 15 networking bloggers to fly out to the bay area, they rent a mega bus (hence the name), and drive around to networking vendors over 2-3 days. The vendors do demos and presentations for the bloggers and there is usually a lively discussion*. These sessions are both live-streamed and then available to watch later at your leisure.

Speed Dating:

The lineup of topics today is: Data Center, Campus Switching, Enterprise Routing, Lunch (we like to throw steaks at the lions), more routing, more switching, and, finally, more Data Center! One new thing we’re doing today: In the morning, during the Enterprise Routing hour (11:30 – 12:30) the team will do three demos and then we’ll vote on the one they want to hear more about.

Three demos in a one hour period may not seem too fast, but it’s actually pretty quick and a bit like speed dating. So to continue the analogy, during lunch, the bloggers vote on which topic they’d like to hear more about during the afternoon 1:30 – 2:30 hour – basically, who they’d like to ask out again. Below, we’ve got the speed dating contestants the overall agenda, and the livestream embedded.

The Contestants For Routing Speed Dating:

Hugo Vliegen is hosting a demonstration session for the Cisco ISR G2 and ASR1K showing off some of the advanced capabilities of these services routers.

Kishan Ramaswamy will give a deep dive into the UCS-E Series Server module integrated in the ISR G2 and provide an example of how business customers can transform their branch offices by leveraging this high performance compute facility.

Natty Iyer will provide an example where Cisco’s OnePK, short for One Platform Kit, is leveraged to enable an Identity Connector on the ISR G2. The tight integration between the Ping Identity Connector and the ISR G2, ensures transparent “Single Sign On” to cloud services from the network. This delivers SSO with the best user experience while establishing a single point for authorizing access to network and cloud services.

Last but not least, Mostafa Mansour is demonstrating the ability to transparently move computing resources between geographically distributed data centers. Overlay Transportation (OTV) on the ASR1K is enabling the deployment of Data Center Interconnect (DCI) between sites without changing the existing network design.

Agenda for the full day:

Data Center Session 1: 8:00am – 10:00am

Phil Casini and John McDowall will cover onePK and our controller

Switching Hour 1: 10:30 – 11:30

Quad Sup VSS SSO demo – Shawn Wargo 20 minutes

Converged Wired + Wireless Access 20 minutes

CAT3850 Presentation – 20 minutes

Routing Hour 1: 11:30 – 12:30 – three demos

opening – 5 min (Hugo Vliegen)

Store-in-the-Box – 15 minutes (Kishan Ramaswamy)

Identity Connector with OnePK Integration – 15 minutes (Natty Iyer)

Private Datacenter Mobility – 15 minutes (Mostafa Mansour)

Lunch 12:30pm – 1:30pm

Voting for Routing Deep Dive Topic

Routing Hour 2: 1:30 – 2:30 – longer talk on voted upon topic

Switching Hour 2: 2:30 – 3:30

Flexible Netflow – 30 minutes

High Availability – 30 minutes

Data Center Talk 2: 4:00pm – 6:00pm

Jan Medved will discuss hybrid switching – 60 minutes

Prashant will be chatting about overlays and hybrid cloud – 60 minutes

The LiveStream:

* Lively Discussion From Last Time: Check out the Catalyst Roadmap discussion