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Time to Move On - The End of Regular Blogging
Despite my proclamation that, now that I finished the MBA, I was back to blogging, the truth is, I've lost the motivation to blog each week. It takes 2-3 hours to write a good blog and, while that is not much time each week, after work, kids, (and some more work), I really prefer to read, watch TV, and golf. It's surprising that once I finished school, work filled in a lot of the free time. Read more
Technology Development Process
A little over 3 years ago, I wrote two blogs on network design process:
In those blogs I referenced Cisco's PDIOO (Plan, Design, Implementation, Operations, and Optimize) framework for design.
Internet Access at 30,000 Feet
I had my first experience with airplane wifi this week on a trip to California. Upon boarding the Southwest flight, I noticed a sticker on the plane saying "Wifi-ready" (or something like that).
This was the leg from RDU to Chicago and, since it was only $5, I gave it a shot. Read more
How About This for an Interesting Merger - Juniper and Riverbed
At the beginning of the year, the editors at Network World send us bloggers a question of mergers we expect in the next year. It's a guessing game (for fun) and an idea for a blog.
I'm a bit late to the fun this year, but I read something a couple weeks ago that made me think of Juniper and Riverbed. Read more
Pre-Quarterly Earnings Announcement News About Cisco's Performance is Tough
Before this evening's earnings announcement from Cisco, the Wall Street Journal published a tough article about Cisco's recent performance. The WSJ article requires a login, but to summarize: Read more
Do You Get the Feeling That It Won't Be Enough WAN Bandwidth?
The primary goal of our WAN Transformation project was to give more bandwidth - a lot more bandwidth - to our field sites. A field site with approximately 50 people will get 30 Mbps MPLS bandwidth (and a backup 6 Mbps that will only be used if the 30 Mbps is down).
But, something's been nagging me lately. Will it be enough? Read more
FIB Suppression and Virtual Aggregation to Help the Internet Scale
Now that I'm done with my MBA, it's back to business travel. Since a lot of my trips are from East coast to West coast, that gives me a lot of time to read on the flights. Last week, on my flight out to California, I got around to reading an old issue of Cisco's Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ). Read more
Cisco Is Getting a Bad Rap on the Corporate Tax Issue
Cisco can't seem to shake the image - at least in blogs - that it's some sort of corporate tax cheat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Read more
I've Graduated and Now I'm Back (to Blogging More)
Yes, my blogging rate has been poor over the last 6 months. I was in the final semester of my MBA program and, after hours of homework each week, just didn't have the motivation to blog.
Well, I'm happy to announce, I graduated from the North Carolina State MBA program on December 18th with a concentration in Corporate Finance.
Read more
Giving Cisco Telepresence its Own QoS Queue is Some Expensive Real Estate
QoS is a tricky beast. In fact, while we are in the midst of WAN Transformation, which puts a lot more VoIP on our new MPLS network, it's become clear that QoS design is the trickiest part of the design. Read more
Our WAN Transformation Engineering Conference is Great
This week in RTP, NC, we held a 3-day "off-site" for our global WAN Transformation Project.
Previous blogs on WAN Transformation:
Read more
Is Cisco Running for Governor in California?
As you might have read from my previous blogs - like my stance on Net Neutrality - you'll probably pick up quickly that I do not vote Democrat often (I don't vote for Republicans much either lately, but that's for a different blog). Nonetheless, I don't care for silliness in politics. Government is serious business as it is the one entity in this nation that can force you do to something and take away your liberty. Read more
A Troubleshooting Conference Call on the Weekend - That Hasn't Happened in a While
There I was this afternoon, after returning from a morning with the family at the NC State Fair, about to start my MBA homework when my IM pops up. "Mike, there are problems in the HQ's WAN after the IOS upgrade two days ago, they are thinking of backing out the upgrade". Read more
Facebook-Skype Alliance Could Drive Some Serious Video Bandwidth Usage
A few random thoughts this week...
We keep hearing about the "Year of Internet Video" and I'm always excited, but it doesn't materialize (ok, ok, blame the recession a little bit). Nothing seemed to be THE application that drove the video bandwidth demand, not Netflix streaming or (probably not) Cisco Umi.
But, then I saw this story last week: Read more
We Love Tunnels Too - EoMPLS to Connect Two Data Centers
I wrote a blog a couple months back about my changing perception of tunnels, aptly titled "It's Time to Start Loving Tunnels". While I midly joked about tunnels in the past, it was becoming clear that tunnels are becoming a much more common - and proper - network design tool. Read more
Positive ROI is What Made WAN Transformation Possible
Previous blogs on WAN Transformation:
Our WAN Transformation project aims to bring many new technologies and enhanced capabilities to users. But, before any of this could be done, the finances had to work out. Read more
Cisco's Dividend Announcement and a Little Corporate Finance Shows How Cisco is Changing
(I'll finish up WAN Transformation next week.) Read more
WAN Transformation is a Huge Project
Building on last week's WAN Transformation blog, our WAN Transformation project grew out of our experience earlier this year with WAN acceleration. We realized that we still wanted WAN acceleration, but we really needed significantly more bandwidth to make it useful. Read more
WAN Transformation is a Go!
If you look back to when I started writing this blog over 3 years ago, I wrote a series of blogs on how we had built our current wide area network:
Making BGP Our Core Enterprise Routing Protocol Read more
Using BGP to Make Our Internet Access Dynamic
Using BGP to Build a Separate Lab Network
Cisco Unified Computing System is 75% Networking - Who Knew?
I thought I'd delve into a slightly less controversial subject this week (well, maybe). My technical background lacks significant hosting experience (servers, storage, operating systems, etc). I understand hosting systems and how to design them into networks, but I'm not going to argue the peculiarities of different Intel CPU designs. Read more
- About From the Field
Michael Morris is a communications engineering manager at a $3-billion high-tech company. His background is in enterprise WANs working with telcos and developing large-scale routing designs. He has worked on networks at government and corporate organizations, including networks at two Fortune 10 companies. In his current role, he leads a team of 10 engineers responsible for large-scale IT networking projects and architectural standards for data networks, storage area networks, IP telephony, contact centers, and security. Michael is CCIE #11733 and recently became one of the first three Cisco Certified Design Experts (CCDE) ever (#20080002). He has 11 years experience in networking and communications, including four years as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army. He has a bachelor's degree in MIS from the University at Buffalo and is working on his MBA from NC State University. In 2008, he was awarded the Network Professional Association (NPA) Professional Excellence and Innovation Award for his work on network architecture, templates and enterprise MPLS design.
Michael Morris's From the Field blog is also featured on the Cisco Learning Network. See it there, along with the blogs of other Cisco Experts.
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