Today started early with the first session at 7:30am. That’s one case where a bit of jet lag helps out, it didn’t help out when I got back to the hotel at close to midnight. The sessions today were more in-depth and packed with information.
Fibre Channel Storage Area Network Design
This was a lot of information for 7:30am! I’ll admit, I need to learn more about FC deployment and design and this was a great class. I learned a lot, and would really like to sit this one again so I’ll be studying the slides and follow-up information they gave out.
Deploying Nexus 7000 in Data Center Networks
Another great session. This covered the design and deployment of the 7000 and how it integrates in to existing network architectures. Other areas such as security, best practices, and common questions were covered. The presenter also walked through several examples of how the configuration CLI compares to that of existing Cisco 6500 systems.
Intel Super Session
The Super Sessions are normally showcases for large partners and this was no exception, but it had more interesting information than I had expected. They covered the new Nehalem processor architecture and showed the ROI for replacing old single core systems. They also demonstrated Flex Migration where you can VMotion from an older CPU architecture to a new server with the Intel 5500 Xeon platform. Intel has a heavy ocus on mobile devices and covered their WiFi/WiMax testing. Finally, they gave their vision for 10Gb connectivity and adding virtualization technology in to the hardware.
Security and Virtualization in the Data Center
This session covered infrastructure security starting from the Core and working out to the virtualized servers. A point stressed that I really believe in: Security requirements shouldn’t change with virtualization. Also, don’t do things in the virtual world you wouldn’t do in physical. For example, if two VMs have very different security profiles don’t run them on the same vSwitch or same VLAN. Sometimes people get sloppy. There was pretty heavy discussion on the Nexus features dealing with security, such as CoPP, broadcast suppression, Packet Sanity Checks, and LinkSec. Real good designs for using the VDC (Virtual Device Context) in the Nexus 7000 showing how to split a single device in to multiple and use them for separate purposes without the nead for multiple physical switches.
The Rest
After the sessions I spent more time in the exhibit hall, mainly talking to the guys in the Intel booth about FCoE and their 10Gb features such as Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq), which offloads packet sorting and queuing to the Intel NIC speeding up transfers and reducing CPU overhead. I’m Twittering granular updates here.
