Well, today was my first real day at Cisco Live…or Networkers..or whatever you call it. Let me just say one thing. For a guy used to North Carolina weather in June, it’s cold in San Francisco! I almost needed a jacket tonight. Crazy!
Had a couple of good sessions today. Nothing too intense, that starts in the morning, but informative nonetheless.
IT Management Kickoff – Navigating the Downturn, Preparing for Upturn
This was a session on managing IT now in the downturn and how to prepare for the upturn in the economy. Interesting ideas and some good points. For example, I don’t think many organizations are worried about employees on the upturn. Will your employees stay? Will you have brain drain? Some information that’s pretty straight forward such as focusing on ROI, and in most cases it’s a very short ROI. Another good point is how to leverage IT in the upturn and what users expect now. College grads go in to the workforce used to information at their fingertips, can your organization give them that? Finally, an interesting statistic in that the average span of a CIO in an organization is 2.5 years. Makes selling those long term strategies tough! Forget projects that span an extended amount of time.
Realizing Benefits of Unified Networking – FCoE – By Intel
This was more of a case study by Intel about Intel and how they moved to Unified Networking/Consolidated I/O with FCoE. They also discussed their 10Gb hardware offerings. If you’ve been following this space there wasn’t really any earth shattering news there. They did throw out some interesting ROI/TCO facts, mainly that they are getting the performance of Fibre Channel with FCoE but at a 25% reduced cost. This is saving them almost $38K per rack of equipment. Interesting.
The day ended with the reception in the exhibit hall. Good beer selection, food looked good (I didn’t partake in that..just the beer!). Seeing as we, Varrow, are not a “true” networking company I spent the better part of my time at the vendors in the data center aspects we are focused on. You see the Nexus 1000v everywhere. The entire Nexus platform is really gaining steam. I think people are starting to “get it” and what it can do for them. VMware is demoing their new extended VMotion between data centers. There is no real magic here. No new hardware. No new software. They are just pushing the current VMotion technology to its limits and seeing how it performs. When all this testing is done they’ll be releasing some updated requirements for just how far you can go. The demo they are showing in their booth is an 80KM distance between two data centers.
Today was a good start to the conference. Tomorrow is going to be something else. I’m starting at 7:30am and going until the evening. The longest break between sessions is 30 minutes, so hopefully I can grab a bite somewhere in there.
