So, I’ve had the chance to attend Cisco Live for the first time this year and as a result, I’m now in Milan-Italy, attending the Cisco live Europe edition during this week. Cisco live is an enterprise gathering for all Cisco enthusiastic, from across the Europe, be that you are a Cisco customer, partner, distributor…etc.
I’m usually a regular attendee at similar events from VMware (VMworld) and NetApp (Insight), and Cisco being another key vendor I often work with, when I was asked to attend Cisco Live this year, I was quite excited and was looking forward to a similar experience to that of VMworld and NetApp Insight. I arrived at the venue for the first time on Monday evening through the Linate airport (closest airport to the venue in Milan) and unfortunately, there were no coach transportation from the airport to the venue provided by Cisco, unlike both VMworld or NetApp Insight. Once you arrive at the venue, you collect your badge from the registration desk which you need throughout the event for gaining access to the venue and everything else inside. Upon collecting your badge, you then collect a little back pack from the gift desk which seems to be customery for all such events (same with VMworld and Insight) which is semi filled with marketing leaflets (yeah…. mine usually go straight out of the bag to the bin 🙂 )
So Tuesday being my first full day at the venue, first event of the day was a general, opening key note speech from Carlos Dominguez and Jeremy Bevan from Cisco. I didn’t really sit through all of their speech as usually these key notes tend to have a bit of a marketing / salesy tone to them. I did listen in to some parts though and the general message seems to be Internet of things and software defined, application centric networking which is nothing new.
My first formal session was not due till 2:15 so I took the opportunity to browse around the World of Solutions exhibition floor where Cisco and 3rd party Cisco partners were showcasing their products. I’ve obviously been around the whole floor to see who’s out there with a view to go look at every solution stand in more detail during the course of the event, a notable absentee was Microsoft, which was suprising given that Cisco and Microsoft seem to have gotten a lot closer lately with their work together on areas such as FlexPod for Hyper-V…etc. There was a small (ish) EMC stand also highlighting the joint VCE alliance they have with Cisco and VMware and a NetApp stand highlighting their joint Flexpod solution which were probably the 2 key stands along with, Hitachi, Citrix and F5. There were lots of different Cisco stands, presumably from each different business unit within Cisco showcasing their technology offering which was good. however I was a little disappointed with the number of partner stands available as there weren’t many, at least not as many as I’ve seen at VMworld or NetApp Insight which was suprising. I expected the Cisco partner echosystem to be a lot bigger, especially with Cisco’s entry in to Unified Computing and SDN but most of the partner stands available were focused on traditional LAN, WAN and Switching products of Cisco and adding value around those products. I would have liked to have seen few more partner oferrings in the SDN (software Defined Networking-ACI) side of things such as Palo Alto networks and UCS (Unified Computing Systems) side of things (which, in all honesty are the areas of Cisco I am interested in rather than old school LAN, WAN, Switching and routing products)…. So overall, to me, it was little disspointing.
However, out of the few 3rd party vendor solution stands I have explored closely so far, I did find this really interesting solution from Stratoscale, which I thought was a very interesting technology in what is supposed to be a true hyper-Converged Infrastructure software offering. (See my article about them here for more info)
As I had few hours to kill before my next session, I decided to attend the Cisco DevNet zone area and do some self phased labs. I had a go at one of the labs on REST API which was good. I’d encourage you to have a look at them online, they are kind of similar to VMware hands on labs if you are in to Development or DevOps side of things involving Cisco kit.
I attended the “Introduction to Application Centric Infrastructure” session (BRKAPP-9000) in the afternoon which was interesting and had quite a lot of content packed to a 2 hour session to give a good overview of the Cisco’s own SDN offering – ACI. I’m not going to mentioned everything mentioned in that lecture here, but one of the key messages was that ACI is a very good solution to co-exist with VMware NSX, contrary to popular belief that Cisco ACI and VMware NSX are always competing technologies, both technologies complement one another and its very much copete NOT compete which is good to hear. The content was very technical and not salesy or markettingy at all which was very good and I hope the other technical sessions I’ve planned to attend during the course of the next few are also as good.
After the ACI session, I headed straight back to the hotel (so I could put this article up) but there was a Welcome reception – a food and drinks filled gathering at the World of Solutions exhibition floor which I decided to take a rain check on.
All in all, day 1 has been a bit of a mixed day with the event so far as not being well organised as compared to VMworld or NetApp insight, not as well attended as those two events, lacked sufficient sessions or 3rd party solutions focused on areas outside of traditional LAN, WAN, Switching and Routing (which may not be an issue for the old school, traditional networking folks), but on the positive side, there were some interesting partner solutions on display along with good, technical lectures from Cisco engineers to attend.
Hopefully day 2 tomorrow would be more interesting…!!
Cheers
Chan