Recently Cisco officially announces the CCIE Data Center on their The Cisco Learning Network website – LINK. This certification track has been long rumored – probably for about 1-2 years now some of us have been waiting for the announcement.
A complete list of the written exam topics in PDF format can be found here – LINK. The Beta exam of the written will be available at Cisco Live San Diego this year if you are interested in taking it during the event, if not – you can take the beta beginning May 1 through June 14 at a cost of $50. If you pass the beta, you will recertify your existing CCIE (like any CCIE level written will) and you will be qualified to take the lab (same deal). My advice on this would be to not take it at Live, you get a free test – use the coupon wisely. If you want to take this test at Cisco Live, invest the $50. If you would rather wait for the go-live of the exam, that will be September 3, 2012.

It arrived today – one day early – the AppleTV 3rd Gen. I jumped on ordering this as soon as I was able to, especially since I wanted to get another one for the bedroom (we already have the 2nd Gen in our family room). The 3rd Gen one will be hooked up on our primary TV in the family room, but I could not wait to see what the 1080P looked like, so I hooked it up.
But first the boring unboxing:
You can see the box in the top picture, here is a picture of… the back of the box! It has some information and such on it, pretty cool for a quick overview of what you can use this for.

When you look at the side of the box, you can see that is boasts 802.11n WiFi, HDMI, and 1080P graphics.

 
As you all are probably aware, I have been keeping an eye out for info on the CCIE Data Center track. I came across some more information and just wanted to take a moment and share it with you.
If you head on over to the Cisco Page on Certification Exams – http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/le11/learning_all_certification_exams_list.html and look around you will notice that CCIE Data Center is listed with MISSING LINK under the numbers 350-080 as well as a MISSING LINK to the CCIE Data Center Lab exam information. At least now we know what test to take, alas it is not on Pearson Vue site – yet. I might give this one a shot at Cisco Live US this year.

 
Got a question – do you know who these guys are?

I am betting that you do – they are Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage AND they are the closing keynote speakers for this years Cisco Live 2012 San Diego! Yes, you are reading that correctly – they will be giving the closing keynote this year at Cisco Live US. I am betting that we will have a packed house for this one – these guys are amazing – I am also betting that they will top last years guest, William Shatner, and his story about the Canoe. You can see it here: LINK  All I have to say is I cannot wait to sit and listen to them – they are brilliant, funny, and all around nerdy.  (Yes, I am starting to think I do have  man crush on them )
I was provided a little background on our guest speakers and would like to share some of it with you, in alphabetical order:

While I was doing my Cisco Live 2012 registration, I noticed something new listed for a Techtorial:

Once I clicked on it -my eyes lit up:

There will be a CCIE Data Center – YEAH BOI!

It is just 6 months away from the next Cisco Live US event, my how time flies.  I just wanted to take a moment and share a quick link with you on the event – they (Cisco Live) is asking for your help in choosing the next bag – you can find the poll here: http://t.co/gWgIxc4b
Some quick images can be seen here, you can see more detailed images on their site.  They do say that these are NOT the actual bag, nor to scale – but ideas that they are looking at.

My personal preference looking at these is either the backpack or the duffle bag.  To be honest, the Duffle Bag might actually make some more sense – it will help get all the freebies home (More space).  But, a backpack is always a safe bet.
See what happens in June!

Well, it has finally come time for me to make a new start in my professional life. Recently I have resigned from my position – Manager of US Network Engineering -at my former employer, KGB. Now, I work for NTT America (www.ntta.com) as Senior Network Engineer, Data Center Services (www.dedicatedserver.com ) . In my new role I will be working with some of the latest technology, cutting edge soltions, data center design, and just all around uber geek stuff. This will be a big change from what I was doing – Managing a team as well as being the Sr Network Engineer, but NTTA is the right place for me to be.

It is just about that time in America were we gather around the table and enjoy a good mean with family in the honor of Thanksgiving.  It is our American tradition to get with family and eat turkey, stuffing, and all-in-all pig-out (and watch some American Football) with people we have not seen since last Christmas or Thanksgiving.  So, in the spirit of Safety for those of you who want to Fry your turkey, I present you the Alton Brown (Good Eats) special on Turkey Frying!  He has some great tips on how to prepare the turkey, but most important – The Turkey Derrick

On October 26th I attended the OpenFlow Symposium in San Jose, CA hosted by Packet Pushers and TechFieldDay at the DoubleTree San Jose. The purpose of this symposium was to help gain more exposure to OpenFlow as well as discuss what some of the major players see and feel about the technology. In attendance was representatives from Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Google, Juniper, NEC, and Yahoo!. They each were allowed to present their views and feelings and then the panel was opened up for discussion and questions.
My take was that Google and Yahoo! are big into this technology as they have the most to gain from it.  They run warehouse size data centers all over the world, and this type of technology has a huge benefit to them as it means they can develop their own controllers and control merchant silicon, thus releasing them from relying on other vendors network hardware to support their data center. Not only that, but they can help prioritize and track individual flows based on what the user is doing. For example – a person who is placing items in their carts and heading to checkout can have a higher priority flow over someone just looking around.  The speed to finish the transaction is important to them, not to mention they can also secure that traffic in the network differently then a person who is just looking.

An OpenFlow Symposium was held in San Jose, CA on October 26th, 2011 and hosted by by PacketPushers.Net and TechFieldDay.Com. This was my first true exposure to the OpenFlow protocol and concepts of SDN (Software Designed Networking), and it was a great exposure.
If you are not familiar with OpenFlow or SDN, please let me take a moment and give you a brief overview and a quick scenario. OpenFlow is a way in which you can have a application – called a Controller – maintain and control switch flow tables. This controller is aware of all flows in the topology of its domain, the domain being the switches/ports that it controls. Yes, you can have specific ports on a switch controlled via the controller, and all the other ports as part of a normal network that is controlled via the switch. OpenFlow will have no impact to the other ports, they will continue to operate just like nothing was different.
A good use case for OpenFlow is Multi-Path Layer 2 switching in a data center or other high bandwidth location. With normal multi-patch technologies one of the links is blocked via STP, thus sitting idle just waiting for the primary link to fail. With OpenFlow, the controller is aware of all paths in the network and able to load the traffic accordingly. Lets take a look at the following diagram: