Musings of Rodos

Welcome to Cisco Networks in Brisbane Australia for 2009.

I will be at the show hanging out, sitting in sessions, chatting to people, doing both duty on my employers stand, as well as speaking in a session or two too.

To keep the discussion kicking along I will be posting to Twitter insights, tips and facts on Cisco Unified Computing System every 30 minutes, for all of the 3 days. I certainly hope its not considered spam, there are 48 gold hand picked tips that are going to come your way. Hopefully they can get discussion going (virtual or physical) for those who are there, participating via CiscoLive or just following it on Twitter.

You can see the tips by following @rodos. Each post will start with "#CNW09 #UCS Tip XX:" where XX is the sequence number of the tip. So you can also search the appropriate hashtags from your favorite Twitter app.

Lets get ready to rumble!

Rodos

Cisco have announced the C-Series of UCS rack mount servers but until now no one has seen any, publicly. Well at Cisco Networkers in Brisbane Australia you can get a look at one on the Alphawest stand in the World of Solutions hall.

Of course if you can't wait, or if you can't make it to Brisbane, I took a very quick and unprepared video which is below (if you can't see it visit the http://rodos.haywood.org/).

The first day of Cisco Networkers in Brisbane Australia today. There was setting up the stand, unpacking some gear plus sitting in on the "Data Centre Design & Concepts TECDCT-3873" session.

The session went into some deep networking concepts. I did okay with lots but some was just to Networking geek for this virtualisation and Cloud guy. There was some great stuff on FCoE, UCS and DC design.

My main takeaway was how much pinning and specific pinning such as MAC pinning is being use in the DC networking of the future. Having spent a lot deep diving into UCS I see a lot of this day to day already, what never clicked to me before was that we have been using this a lot in the past because a VMware vSwitch uses MAC pinning.

Here is a quick video I did at the end of the day to summarise (no more 20 minute videos like I did at VMworld)!

Hopefully I will be able to show more snippets from the event each day.

Rodos

We have something special to reveal on my employers stand at Networkers in Brisbane Australia tomorrow.

Here is a picture grab from the video I took of me doing a quick tour during the stand build earlier today. Rather than waiting till tomorrow I plan on uploading the video later tonight when I get back to the hotel.



Once you know what it is, if you want to deep dive and see more, drop by the Alphawest/Optus booth in the World of Solutions once it opens tomorrow.

Also see if you can come to one of the session I am speaking in "UCS : Opportunities, Objectives and Outcomes (ITMPCS-6500)" which is on Tuesday at 1:45pm to 2:30pm.

I look forward to the revealing as well as chatting to people who come by the stand.

Rodos

My inbox got lots of messages today about Savvis releasing more details of their project Spirit that was mentioned at VMworld. You can read the press release.

What was interesting was the mention of security and VMware VMsafe. They don't mention the how of the security feature, you need to go elsewhere to get that piece of the puzzle.

Reflex published a press release today as well, stating that Savvis would be using their technology for Spirit. Puzzle solved.

I met up with the Reflex guys at VMworld a few weeks ago to dig a lot deeper into what they are doing in the cloud, great to see them have a good win like this.

Rodos