Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Cisco Live!

I can't attend Cisco Live! this week but you can see some of the keynotes and other interesting items on the website. Looks like Cisco is announcing a bunch of stuff this year which is good news. The only thing I wish I was attending for was to get involved and be able to ask the tough questions about road map and support for IPv6. A lot of that was done at the Google IPv6 Implementors Event a few weeks ago but upper Cisco management and in particular - the product groups, were NOT at that event. Hard to see how important something is if key folks aren't paying attention.

I hope Cisco starts to push internally feature parity for IPv6 - there is a huge gap in "supporting" IPv6 and in having feature parity to their existing product portfolio. It will come over time but I think a bigger push needs to happen... and soon.
- Ed

Monday, June 14, 2010

NANOG 49 - San Francisco

For those that do not follow what is happening in the Internet Service Provider space much you might find it interesting that the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) is hosting their meeting in San Francisco this week. Many folks came in early to attend the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference that happened last Thursday and Friday in Mt. View and are now having fun in San Francisco.

The agenda has lots of IPv6 on it also, I am sort of bummed I will not have time to make it to event but I hope all those attending are enjoying it.

I also got to sit in on a conference call today about how the new North American IPv6 Task Force and the other regional task forces (like the California one) will be structuring and building out resources. Stay tuned for some cool events, labs facilities and meetings to happen across the country soon based out of this work. In the mean time, if you are interested in starting to hear about what will be happening with IPv6 in California you can follow http://twitter.com/CAv6TF and we will let you know when things are going on.
- Ed

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Google IPv6 Implementors Conference

Attending the Google IPv6 Implementors Conference - the slide decks are available on the site to download. Great presentations on what is happening in the IPv6 space.

Definitely check out the presentations, especially the Facebook presentation - they turned up their experimental IPv6 service in short order and are only using 3 IPv6 addresses to get it deployed, remarkable. To top it off they spend no new capital to make it happen.

I have a feeling the content here is a bit better than what is going on at TechEd but perhaps the gauntlet has been thrown - come on Microsoft, where are you on this?
- Ed

Friday, June 04, 2010

California IPv6 Task Force

I am excited to announce that I have been appointed a co-chair on the California IPv6 Task Force handling the Bay Area. The California IPv6 Task Force (CAv6TF) is chartered with doing advocacy and education regarding IPv6 in the state of California.

With my new appointment comes the obvious questions, what sort of events should the CAv6TF do to cover both advocacy and education? I would love to hear from people about what they feel are the best ways to go about this prior to driving off with the bus half full. Specifically, what format and topics would be the best for the Bay Area crowd who definitely have their own unique requirements.

If you are interested in participating please follow us on twitter and keep an eye out for the relaunch of our website. We believe this will be a big year for IPv6 in general and I am personally excited to start working on the events!
- Ed

IF-MAP - Infoblox and Juniper pushing a new standard

I attended an Infoblox and Juniper joint presentation on IF-MAP and it looks interesting. I think they are attempting to rally support around the standard so a great deal is self serving (asking folks to push for IF-MAP inclusion in RFP's for instance.) That being said, I do think the standard addresses a real need requirement in the industry regarding getting multi-vendor solutions to utilize a common state engineer (which is what IF-MAP really is) which anyone can leverage for different purposes. I primarily see it for a single database location for NAC and policy authentication and enforcement systems to share information in a transparent way and to subscribe to changes in the "state" of something and then take action based on those states.

Vendors who are doing policy enforcement should keep an eye on the standard to determine if they need to have a solution that will work with IF-MAP. What will be really interesting is if monitoring and alerting systems start utilizing the IF-MAP standard to learn what is happening on the network to drive alerting from layer 1 all the way up to application attributes. This already happens on the enforcement side but there is little in the way of alerting and monitoring notification that can do something similar.

I don't think this will change the landscape of the data center models being developed today by the likes of HP or Cisco but this is a critical issue to enterprise and commercial customers as a pain point and if vendors choose to implement IF-MAP then they certainly might gain an advantage in terms of interoperability.
- Ed