Cisco Live US, San Diego CA

June 2, 2012 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Next week I’m off to San Diego for Cisco Live US 2012. My previous experience with Cisco Live was definitely positive: It’s a whole world of networking fanatics and lots of ecosystem companies. Plus, last year included an amazing party hosted by yours truly (in disguise!)

Cisco Live features an excellent show floor with a variety of ecosystem companies

Cisco Live is both a trade show and conference. Although there’s definitely a Cisco slant, it’s one of the key shows in the data networking space (along with Interop), so there’s a wide variety of companies present. You won’t find Cisco’s biggest competitors there, but you will see lots of variety, from storage to security, to servers.

That’s one of the things I like best about Cisco Live: The variety. As a storage-focused guy, I go to all the storage shows and see the same companies again and again. It’s so nice to get out of my little box and see how other parts of the datacenter work. That’s why the keynotes are interesting to me, too, regardless of whether or not they contain actual surprises to the CCIE’s in the room!

Extreme? No way! That's networkers for you!

The networking folks are another reason to attend. They’re a rowdy bunch, whether they’re talking Ethernet switches, datacenter fabrics, wireless networking, or just about any other topic. And they really know their stuff! I learn more in a few minutes at a show like Cisco Live than in hours online.

your-hosts-Rick-Blaine-and-Ilsa-Lund — How could we top this party?

Then there’s the “being there” aspect. You just can’t beat meeting in person, and sometimes some craziness can result. In Vegas last year, Jennifer Huber and I hosted a Casablanca-themed party at Paris (get it?), complete with period costumes. We decided we just couldn’t top that this year, though we did consider it!

Instead, I’ll be joining up with the Networking Tech Field Day delegates, No Strings Attached crew, and the Packet Pushers for lots of content creation:

We’re recording a sequel to our Cisco Virtual Symposium on Tuesday, focused on the announcements sure to come at Cisco Live!
Packet Pushers is recording a series of podcasts Tuesday and Wednesday
As we prepare for Wireless Field Day 3, I’m hoping to get the No Strings Attached folks for some recordings too
I’ll be roaming the halls with my portable recording rig for more ad-hoc videos – contact me if you’d like to be included!

Watch for lots of great content here at my blog, as well as on Twitter, Vimeo, Flickr, YouTube, and everywhere else I go!

You might also want to read these other posts...

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.

It’s Time To Move Beyond Passwords (Especially On Web Sites)

January 8, 2016

Sure, single sign-on puts all your eggs in one basket. But this is vastly preferable to trusting that hundreds of third-party baskets are secure, especially when they prove on a weekly basis that they aren’t! It’s time to put distributed passwords behind us and switch to systems like SAML, both for businesses and consumers.

Infographic: Real-World Port Throughput Relative To Thunderbolt (Formerly Light Peak)

February 21, 2011

Just how fast is 10 gigabits per second anyway? To help out, I’ve prepared another napkin-tastic infographic!

Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do

June 4, 2013

Data storage isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially at enterprise or cloud scale. It’s simple enough to read and write a bit of data, but much harder to build a system that scales to store petabytes. That’s why I’m keenly focused on a new wave of storage systems built from the ground up for scaling!

A Complete List of VMware VAAI Primitives

November 10, 2011

VMwareâ€™s introduced the â€œvStorage APIs for Array Integrationâ€ (VAAI) in vSphere 4.1, and block-heads like me went nuts. Weâ€™ve been trying to integrate storage and servers for decades, and VMwareâ€™s APIs finally allowed this to work in truly seamless fashion. But the world of VAAI is a thicket of bizarre naming and puzzling functionality. Some VAAI primitives are ignored or even hidden! Letâ€™s take a look at the complete list.

How to Get Me to Write about Your Company or Product

March 15, 2012

Blog posts are really, really important for PR and awareness these days. And posts on independent sites like this one are critical to get awareness and search engine ranking. I get dozens of requests every week from companies wanting me to write about them. So I thought it would be a good idea to lay out exactly what it takes!

Review: American Standard’s Champion 4 Toilet Flushes Almost Anything

July 31, 2012

Although most crappers are crap, plumbing companies like American Standard are hard at work innovating to eliminate the excrement. The current champion is fittingly called the Champion 4, and I have purchased, installed, and tested two examples of the type. The Champion is engineered to reduce the most common causes of clogs, and it has proved effective and “hands-off” in my real-world testing.

Sony NEX-5 Camera Review

September 15, 2010

The world of photography is like so many others: A vast gulf separates the amateurs and enthusiasts, from equipment to nomenclature to skills. I am decidedly in the amateur camp when it comes to photography, but I recently upgraded to a new compact interchangeable-lense camera, the Sony alpha NEX-5. It is an excellent match for my needs, allowing me to expand my skills and explore more advanced photographic techniques without sacrificing portability and ease of use.

Scaling Storage At The Client

November 25, 2013

Scaling storage is a serious challenge for the industry, but there is a great deal of thought, effort, and creativity going into it right now. Companies like Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe have come up with effective client-side solutions to enable scale-out storage to sing. If you’ve got an appropriate application, client, or gateway, scale-out is a real possibility!

You might also want to read these other posts...

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply