A few of the things disucussed from the ‘cisco’ LIVE 2011 European Conference
Cisco held its annual European customer conference, CiscoLIVE in London, January 31-February 3, 2011. As a delegate I had the chance to attend some really in depth and useful educational sessions hosted by Cisco experts, John Chambers, Cisco CEO and Chairman, kicked off the event with a keynote speech in which he highlighted that Cisco was changing its culture from “Command and Control” to collaboration. The reasoning is that C’n’C works well for physical switches and routers, but moving to the cloud mentality of a pay for use services in more loosely coupled environments, a framework of collaboration is going to be more effective. The big bets were predictable, but I’m glad someone is addressing the humdrum issues.
. Collaboration, delivering pay as you go services
. Ubiquity of video, 90% of consumer traffic by 2014 will be video
. Data centre virtualisation, server and storage unification
. Security and reliability, addressing the increasing threats to the net economy
Higher bandwidth network protocols
The bandwidth requirements will be driving out the 10Gbit Ethernet deployments. This will be the year where PCs and laptops will start appearing with 10GE built on to the motherboard. This will require enterprises and service providers to aggregate to 40GE and 100GE on the back end for which the IEEE ratified the 802.3ba standard in June last year. 40GE is a bit of an odd number but it’s really just 4 x 10GE that makes sense in terms of incremental costs steps because 100GbitE is expensive using 25 fibre wide ribbon cables.
Last IPv4 address allocated
There was a buzz that at last IPv4 is finished; the last allocation of IPv4 address blocks have been issued by the Number Resource Organization (NRO). This doesn’t have a huge impact because we have had IPv6 addressing available since 1995. One lecture I attended disarmed me of the belief that IPv6 would somehow be more secure than the old system. Alas, that is not the case and worse, the virtualisation of servers makes the maintenance of LAN separation more complicated when virtual servers start moving between virtual LANs. The traditional practice of separation of LAN circuits say finance, development and operations can no longer be supported without smarter virtual switches.
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