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One of my customers is planning to migrate his data center network to Rapid Spanning Tree. Although RSTP is a well established technology, it will be new to his site. Cisco has a migration discussion here: Spanning Tree from PVST+ to Rapid-PVST Migration Configuration Example Building on that discussion, I…

Cisco has courage. The world of IT is changing, and rather than cling to the successes of the past, Cisco is trying to embrace and shape the future.  Bruce Klein [...]

Recently, Cisco generously provided a briefing to the CiscoChampions, updating the group with new details about Cisco ACI. The presentation was NDA until April 2, I presume coordinated with announcements to be made at InterOp. The biggest new item I noticed was OpFlex. I'll tell you what I know about…

Sunday, Day -1 of the Cisco Partner Summit 2014 Travel.  It’s never good to get squeezed for time, so I always like to arrive before the activities start. Virtual attendees [...]

I’m speaking at both Enterprise Connect and Interop again this year. The Enterprise Connect conference is March 17 – 20, 2014. I’ll be presenting the very successful session titled How to [...]

Here in the Baltimore-DC area, we can't wait for Spring to end all the cold snowy weather we've been having. We don't quite see the signs yet. We need a new groundhog! Anybody want a used one? In contrast, things are really heating up and getting exciting with DFA and…

Ever since I heard that the Nexus 9K has 50% less code, I've been wondering what features were removed from the code. So I did my best to figure it out, since I haven't seen a detailed features list from Cisco yet (early days and all that). I've also noticed…

The Cisco announcement last November of Insieme ACI and Nexus 9K hardware gave us a plethora of choices, and left many wonder what Nexus box they should use, and where. It behooves us all to understand the Cisco Nexus product positioning, since they aren't cheap, and we don't want to paint…

I get the strangest looks when I talk about POAP and ask people "Why Aren't You Using It?" Admittedly, it doesn't help that I like to pronounce acronyms like words, and POAP comes out sounding like "Pope" or perhaps "Poe-App". Perhaps it will help if I mention that POAP is…

The good news is that there are lots of ways to capture packets on Cisco device. That's also the bad news: there are many different ways to do differing degrees of capture, depending on the device type! No doubt this is a side effect of the independent and somewhat Darwinian…

I presented a Cisco Mid-Atlantic Users Group session on "Datacenter Topics" today. It covered NSX, DFA, ACI, among other things. I even said "SDN" a couple of times. And thanks to the 80 or so people that braved snow (flurries) to attend! And those who drove 2-3 hours! The intent of…

In this blog, I'd like to come at Practical SDN from a different point of view. Thanks to all those who slogged through the previous blogs in the series. I suspect those either had too much or too little information in them, depending on your point of view. Anyway, I've been…