Cisco Live 2017 has come and gone. Our team of engineers arrived in Las Vegas in style, spent the week attending presentations, networking, listening to keynote speakers, exploring the new technologies at the World of Solutions, and came back to California with an overload of information. Now that they have had some time to digest everything they took in at Cisco Live they are ready to share their take on the week!
Sofiane Ammar, Support Engineer – First Cisco Live Experience
Networking industry landscape is rapidly changing so it’s important to see what’s out there. For my first Cisco Live attendance, it was an overwhelming event, full of new ideas and information. I was excited to see the Cisco bees with tiny hi-tech backpacks to record and study behavior of individual bees! I was only carrying an explorer pass which didn’t give me access to attend breakout sessions unfortunately. I attended a few collaboration, route and switch labs. I especially liked the DMVPN troubleshooting lab where I deployed a phase 3 DMVPN design and interacted with the Cisco engineers to get more in depth on this technology. I Discovered with emotion the new Catalyst 9000 launch and its interesting design features. We were all charmed with the new Cisco DNA architecture that will introduce a new era of networking.
Dominic Zeni, Consulting Services SME – Cisco Live World of Solutions: Virtual Reality
Sometimes technology can be awe inspiring. Sometimes technology can provide hope for a better future. And sometimes technology can be frightening. From my perspective, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality is all of the above. This year at Cisco Live US, I had the chance to experience Virtual Reality in a few different forms and I came away with mixed feelings. The overwhelming takeaway was the awe inspiring, hope for a better future feeling. Aside from the obvious and apparent application in home entertainment Virtual Reality provides, this technology can be leveraged in just about any industry to make the impossible, possible. Education and healthcare are two industries where I can see immediate use cases to improve outcomes for students/teachers and patients/doctors alike. Imagine being able to send your child to a virtual classroom to learn from the very best teachers the world has to offer. Or to trivially connect a terminally ill cancer patient in the UK with the doctors in the USA providing bleeding edge experimental treatments. This technology overcomes many of the barriers presented by our physical world while emulating (most) all of the human experience. I won’t venture much into the frightening aspects of this technology, because I think you can use your imagination to think about all of the dystopian futures it could create. Many of these make for great cinema. Bruce Willis in Surrogates is an awesome movie, but at the same time it is a terrifying reality. In a future that will seemingly be full of Virtual Reality, we will have to take the good with the bad, and in the end, it will be up to us to make use of it appropriately.
Trevor Butler, Principal Network Architect – Encrypted Traffic Analysis & Digital Network Architecture
Cisco Encrypted Traffic Analysis (ETA)
Cisco’s Encrypted Traffic Analysis is a game changer in the world of network security. It is the newest feature in their threat analysis service, and just as the name suggests allows for analysis of encrypted traffic, namely around finding malware. Using their vast ThreatGrid libraries, Cisco has been cataloging the fingerprints of encrypted traffic which contain malware. With this catalog ETA is able to detect encrypted malware without needed to decrypt the traffic like the traditional IPS systems would be required to do. This means that organizations that need to meet privacy regulations, something traditional IPS fails to do, can finally protect their users from encrypted malware.
Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA)
The newest feature in Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture is a new campus fabric and with it a new network controller called DNA Center. DNA Center is an Orchestrator that lays on top of APIC-EM, Network Data Platform (NDP), and Identity Services Engine (ISE). DNA Center gathers information from NDPs data analysis platform, then checks what it is seeing on the network against user policies in ISE, finally it then makes automatic network changes using APIC-EM. To support the new campus fabric, Cisco has released the new Catalyst 9000 series switches which are designed specifically for use via APIC-EM and DNA Center. Using this new ecosystem, the way we think about networking will change forever.
Dustin Kaplan, Network Engineer – Spark Room Kit
Cisco brings the power of collaboration to small-medium sized team rooms with the release of the Cisco Spark Room Kit video endpoint series. Available in two models, the Spark Room Kit or Spark Room Kit Plus, enables team rooms of 1-14 participants with a method to simply and effectively add collaboration capabilities to the space. No matter which Room Kit model you choose you’ll get access to a proven, rich, next-gen feature set that includes native 4K wireless or wired content sharing, an integrated high-definition camera with speaker tracking and the flexibility to register the device to your existing on-premise Unified Communications Manager or to the cloud via Cisco Spark. In-addition to the suite of features and functionality packed into either of the Room Kit series endpoints, its important to notice that form did not take a backseat. The Spark Room Kit and Room Kit Plus were also awarded the prestigious 2017 reddot product design award.
Lee Jolly, Network Engineer - Fidget Spinners; Their role in Cisco Live and society
On it’s face, the allure of fidget spinners might be hard to comprehend. It doesn’t really do anything, it just spins. To some, it’s cathartic just to watch spin. To others, it’s an opportunity to ponder frictions role in perpetual motion and the gyroscopic effect on moving objects. As a father to a daughter in junior high school, I can say that within the walls of that school they are like cigarettes or ramen noodles in prison…a form of currency to barter with and a sign of social standing within her peer groups! Having a dozen or more fidget spinners in the public-school system is like an ‘El Chapo’ level of prison wealth! Knowing this, and knowing that the Cisco Live World of Solutions would probably be filled with them, how could I not be on the hunt? My daughter’s safety and well-being depended on it. What follows is my day by day account of my fidget spinner related notes and activities:
Cisco Live – Monday (World of Solutions Day 1)
I have two goals today:
1. Find companies and products that LookingPoint can partner with to improve our services
2. Get as many fidget spinners as possible
My expectations were that you wouldn’t be able to throw a stress ball without hitting a vendor giving away fidget spinners. My expectations were wrong. Like a kid on Halloween hearing rumors of the house giving away full size candy bars, there was a lot of chatter amongst attendees...”I hear that X booth has them”, “I got one from X, go there quick, they looked low!”
Found a booth! Just sat through a 5-minute speech on a platform I’ll never use. Success though!
Walking and spinning….getting a lot of questions about where I got it. I tell them about the 5-minute speech…some look dejected by that news, others OK with it.
Found one with lights! LED lights are obviously not as heavy as the weights they use for the others. Disappointed with spin quality, but lights are nice.
Found a few more, no more audience participation required speeches, but you can tell they are treating these things like gold.
Cisco Live – Wednesday
Here is a pro tip about World of Solutions: Vendors don’t want to take promo material home. Whereas on Monday, getting a fidget spinner was like taking candy from a baby (actually quite hard…they really hold on to it and they cry a lot once you get it), Wednesday was like taking candy from a health nut…freely handing them out as if they didn’t want anything to do with them.
Our CEO and the management team flew in today for an engineering strategy session. During most of the session (and dinner) you could hear the gentle flick, whirr……flick, whiirrr of several spinners at once. Clearly these aren’t just for kids!
My collection of fidget spinners was a huge success! My daughter essentially owns a block of the junior high and has a the Snapchat and Instagram stories to prove her material wealth. I was the ‘cool dad’ for several minutes and I have the Cisco Live World of Solutions to thank!