From the Field

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...

Technology Development Process

A little over 3 years ago, I wrote two blogs on network design process: Network Design Process Network Design Process - Part 2 In those blogs I referenced Cisco's PDIOO (Plan, Design, Implementation, Operations, and Optimize)...

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...

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...

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: Cisco is having problems in some...

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...

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...

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. Last week Network World Editor Jim Duffy had a generally fair blog on this issue, but...

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...

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. It requires understanding...

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: WAN Transformation is a Go! WAN Transformation is a Huge Project Positive ROI is What Made WAN...

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). ...

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...

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...

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...

Positive ROI is What Made WAN Transformation Possible

Previous blogs on WAN Transformation: WAN Transformation is a Go! WAN Transformation is a Huge Project Our WAN Transformation project aims to bring many new technologies and enhanced capabilities to users. But, before any of...

Cisco's Dividend Announcement and a Little Corporate Finance Shows How Cisco is Changing

(I'll finish up WAN Transformation next week.) WARNING - this blog has boring corporate finance stuff and no mention of bandwidth, router models, or cool geek stuff like BGP routing. But, this is something all of us should...

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...

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 Using BGP to Make Our Internet...

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...