lineecho's blog

First, I would like to thank Douglas Gourlay for responding to my post at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/24657/177203#comment-177203. You can find his home page at Cisco http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/ in his role as Senior Director of Marketing and Product Development for Cisco Data Centre.

All that Fibrechannel and FCOE adds to a data centre is more complexity, and more organisational pain. 'Operational Orchestration' does not occur. Fibrechannel enables the Server and Networking teams to balkanize and does not create synergy. Worse, it creates an opportunity to have a dialog about my FC is better than your IP.

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So following on from my previous post, I threw out the comment that FCoE was nowhere. Lets dig into that a bit and turn over the garden bed of truth. Where else to start but fibrechannel.org
- From http://www.fibrechannel.org/FCoE.html#Q5
Q5: Where is FCoE in the standards process?
A: The project has been approved and meetings have been scheduled to agree upon details of the standard. There is wide agreement on most fundamental aspects of the technology. The wide technical interest assures that the standard is likely to meet its target date of 2H’08.

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I am gonna go out on a limb here, as say the Cisco Nexus 7000 looks a bit like a work in progress to me. It ain't finished, it ain't shipping, but just you wait, it will be real nice when it gets here.

Why ?

- The unit won't ship for at least a couple of months, probably longer, and will probably only get support in the lab, not in live.

- you can only have the 10 slot, the 18 slot comes 'later'.

- FCoE isn't primetime, yet. Storage is a real slow moving business.

- No MPLS. Future version, later in the year.

- No MPLS. Really.

- its a brand new OS: corollary IOS didn't cut it at the bug end of town - extension - what happens to IOS XR ?

- loads of software functions not implemented. (Good thing you can upgrade without interruption.)

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I just read Brad Reese on CCIE bias toward Cisco - http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20559. Its mostly bunk of course, but there some elements of truth in the piece.

By extension, any Cisco Partner is equally biased towards selling Cisco. They are motivated at many levels to offer only Cisco products, and the Cisco Marketing machine is brutally efficient and ensuring that partners do not get 'out of line'. Silver and Gold partners must meet minimum levels of service and sales volumes to retain their status, and greater volumes bring benefits (not just profits).

Many CCIE are manufactured by the Reseller business and adopt the bias as inherent in the system. A lot of people may not even realise the alignment of their goals with the Cisco business.

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Ok, ok, so I use an Apple Mac. As a freelance engineer I can make my own choices, and I thought long and hard before moving away from Windows. But really, it been no choice at all.

Most of the my recent work has been in security, (sometimes that doesn't leave me with much to talk about) and when I hit a new corporate site, no one is going to let you put that Windows notebook on the network are they ! No way.

Worse, they are going to push some rubbish onto your Windows with Group Policy and Windows installation is instantly poisoned one way or another. Maybe they even mandate virus software, NAC etc. Then all of the other detritus and modifications that corporate sysadmins add to make their lives easier (and noticeably, not mine).

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So, I am working for a very large international bank. And I need to get into the data centre to 'touch' the boxen. Gotta weave a little magic at the console, sometimes you just can't help it.

And, you know, I just can't get there. Security is stopping me from changing anything.

The data centre is so secure, that basically no one can get in.

First, you have to notify location security of every person who will attend.

Second, you have to specify the exact times and duration of your expected work time.

Third, you must have a relevant change request to cover your attendance.

Fourth, you must be accompanied by authorised staff member.

Brilliant you say ? Sounds like classic security policy ? Yes ?

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I took a step out of my normal role this week and dropped into another company to solve some problems with their HTTP proxy infrastructure.

At first, I was more than a little concerned that I was out of my depth. The person coming in to 'fix' things might reasonably be expected to have unique talents.

After a couple of days of looking closely at the problem, and reading extensively to understand the system, I had a revelation. The people around me actually understood the problem.

And they knew exactly what needed to be done to fix it. The vendor had already worked it out.

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ISCSI and Fibrechannel - ISCSI will win..... but only just

I was looking over the Blog entry for Ed Chapman at http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/2007/02/ethernet_over_barbed_wire_arcn.htm where he is pointing out that many customers are concerned that Cisco is ISCSI centric. Rightly he points out that Cisco was an early player in the ISCSI market.

What I feel he really missed, is the gap between Networking and Server teams; and the difference this makes as a customer.

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A different day today, I have been demonstrating Cisco Network Management applications all day. I had a discussion with a guy who installed CiscoWorks about three years ago, played with it for a couple of days, and then gave up.

Back then CiscoWorks felt like a hodge podge of little applications, and the integration between them was pretty poor. It was hard to discern where the workflow. I agreed with him and haven't had much to do with CiscoWorks.

However, I have recently had to do quite a bit of integration with Cisco Security Manager and CiscoSecure Access Control Server. As a result, I am becoming more confident that things have been updated. My experience is that

- the server engine is stable

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