A quick update on what I am up to...
Most of you know that I have jumped headfirst into my CCIE studies for Data Center. Cisco has created a marketplace with their Data Center products that has changed the landscape, particularly in Compute and Virtualization, and they are poised to do it again (more on that later). I usually view vendor certifications as a money grab for vendors, and certainly Cisco is making a boatload off of their certification tracks, but I am such a believer in their Data Center philosophy and product line that I am biting this particular piece off.
Many of the people I look to for guidance in the CCIE community (McGahan, Burns, Snow, Reville, etc) have said that starting and maintaining a blog as you study for an advanced certification helps with retention and understanding, so for the foreseeable future this blog will be focused on Cisco Data Center. I will try not to make it too technical, and give an "in the field" view of current technology and what's on the horizon. I don't want to rehash what other CCIE-DC Bloggers have done, so in many cases I will link to their blogs. I will also try to make a few non IT related blurbs as well, just to keep readership ;-).
Cisco Nexus 9508....purty!
Without further ado, here is some, as we say, Content!
Yesterday Cisco announced their plan for the future, and it is cool! Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, represents a complete overhaul in the way IT infrastructures will be designed and built. Cisco's TechWiseTV took an inside look into ACI, and in that video a revelation was presented almost as a passing remark: "..There is no value to being a VLAN plumber, anymore". What is being said is that the days of typical Routing and Switching are passing fast, and engineers and architects will need to embrace technologies like SDN in order to keep up. Infrastructure will and must be developed around the application. In the past, we designed infrastructures as molds that applications had to fit into. If they couldn't fit, the infrastructure had to be changed at significant cost. Virtualization helped alleviate a lot of the associated pain, but also caused additional pain for the underlying network. With ACI, the compute, storage, and virtualization frameworks will be able to adapt to an application on a PER APPLICATION BASIS. This type of fine grained control of resources has been needed for a very long time. Not only does this architecture allow for the customization of performance parameters on a per flow basis, it allows for a level of network security that has not been seen to date. Having the identity of an application, system, and user be present within traffic flows allows for supreme multi-tenant offerings without the brain numbing complexity that is used in today's environments.The infrastructure will now be able to adjust itself on the fly based on user and application signatures operating on guidance from a powerful policy engine.
What does this mean for us soon to be former VLAN plumbers? Get smart on ACI, because it is Cisco's intent for this to become the new way in which the IT world functions, and all news seems to indicate that industry partners are falling in line. Our comfortable silos are being torn town in the name of efficiency, and it will be those of us who can adapt to an unprecedented level of cross-discipline collaboration that will be successful moving forward. Get smart on the various technologies within networking, storage, virtualization, etc; because the days of our being able to pin ourselves to a single one of these have officially been given notice.
Next week I hope to get more information on the ACI product offerings, and be able to review them here. For now, head over to Matt Oswalt's (@mierdin) blog for some great information!
Whaddya mean they're not handing us the game?!?
Broncos Note: As I have hoped, Kansas City will come into Denver unbeaten...Barring any unforeseen occurrences against SD this week, Peyton Manning will be the first QB that KC has faced in 7 weeks that was a starting QB in week 1. KC will need to score more than 24 points in order to compete, and to this point, even against sub-par competition, they have not been able to do so....Denver wins, 40-23.
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