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When building an IPv6-enabled Service Provider (or large enterprise) core, you have three design options: dual-stack deployment, running IPv6 over MPLS (6PE) or running IPv6 inside a VPN (6VPE). My new webinar, Building IPv6 Service Provider core, describes the principles of all three design options and their comparative benefits and drawbacks. It’s targeted at CCNP/CCIE-level engineers with basic IPv6 knowledge and includes detailed configuration examples and router printouts. After attending the webinar, you’ll get complete router configurations which you can use in your own lab to test the scenarios discussed in the webinar.

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When I received the first invitations to Cisco’s product announcement that will “forever change the Internet”, I knew it would be another case of overpromising and underdelivering. But even being prepared for the let down, I was totally disappointed when the “magic” product was another high-end router. No doubt it’s an important product, no doubt it will give the Tier-1 service providers a tenfold improvement of the total network throughput, no doubt it’s a wonderful piece of engineering (quoting the Cisco’s press release: it unifies the combined power of six chips to work as one ... you see how banal and degrading the engineering efforts look when described by marketing?), but it will “forever change the Internet” in the same way that AGS+, Cisco 7000, Cisco 7500, Cisco 12000 and CRS-1 did ... by providing ever-higher core network throughput.

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We’re proud to announce the foundation for the Next-Generation Internet: The Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System.  This advanced platform is designed to deliver a new wave of video, mobile and data center/cloud services. 

Some stats on the CRS-3:

• The Cisco CRS-3 triples the capacity of its predecessor, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, with up to 322 Terabits per second,
• This enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; and
• Every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and
• Every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.

The responses to the “Can you help me fix the webinar marketing?” question were quite explicit: it’s too expensive for most people. Several readers indicated that they feel the optimal price would be around $50 (and some off-line respondents told me the original $90 price tag was too hard to expense). As Julian pointed out, “the market is always right”, so I’ve decided to reduce the price for the next webinars to $49.99, including the “Choose the optimal VPN service” on May 11th and the “Market trends in Service Provider networks” on June 2nd.

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By “life beyond 25″, I mean beyond 25 pounds lost. Down another 0.8 this past week, after a weekend of not being particularly well-behaved when it came to food.  So, I’m very happy with 204.2.  During the week, I was as low as 203.0, which was sort a weird moment.  I lost 2 pounds in 4 days – really?  No, not really.  That’s why I only do an official weigh-in once a week.

I was really hoping to get a hike in this week, but it looks like next week is the earliest I’m going to be able to work that out.  I have the hike and route planned, now I just need my life to let go of me long enough to get out there.  In the meantime, I’m working on how to burn more calories during the 50 to 70 minutes I have at the gym in the morning.  I managed to burn about 1400 calories this morning, combining time on the tread climber with the incline trainer.

Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior (@Padmasree on Twitter) today offers a blog to Fortune.com’s “Postcards” section edited by Patricia Sellers.  Warrior writes:

“Today is International Women’s Day. While we’re celebrating the achievements of women, we also need to recognize that in many fields, there are way too few women. This is the case in my domain: engineering and technology. And so, I’m spending today thinking about the future–and asking, How can we use this day to help the next generations of women charge ahead? I can help by sharing 10 career tips that I’ve learned along the way…and by the way, guys on the way up can relate to these too.”

Her tips include:

- Creativity is a journey beyond boundaries

- Build expertise from experience

- The only person that can slow you down is you

We’re in the middle of some interesting times for the Digital Media Systems team.  Recently, at the Digital Signage Expo, the largest tradeshow for digital signage in North America, Cisco announced the expansion of our Digital Media Creative Services to simplify content creation for our customers.  The announcement generated a lot of interest for Cisco, drawing a busy booth with attendees interested in demoing a variety of our solutions such as Cisco Digital Signs, Cisco Show and Share, Cisco Cast, Cisco Media Experience Engine and more.

We’re also thrilled to announce that Cisco, along with our customers, received two Gold Apex Awards.  In the stadium and arenas category, Cisco and the Miami Dolphins’ Sun Life Stadium (previously known as Landshark) earned the gold for deploying Cisco StadiumVision and for the education and healthcare category; Cisco and the Northern Virginia Community College was awarded for the unique deployment of digital signage across the campus as well.  Awarded by Digital Signage Expo, the Apex recognizes innovation in the global digital out-of-home industry.

Bad designer, one of my favorite devil’s advocates asked an interesting question about post-course survey results:

The bias toward higher scores is definitely present and is in fact so strong that 4.0 usually represents a barely acceptable result; sometimes the minimum acceptable average score for an instructor is set to 4.3 – 4.5. It’s also very important to understand how the questions are phrased and what the results actually mean.

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I’ve started a new blog devoted to peakbagging (climbing to the summit of) the 48 4,000+ foot mountains in New Hampshire.  I want to hike them all at least twice – once in whatever season, plus once in winter. For me, there’s something about blogging that helps me stay focused on a goal.

http://nh48.wordpress.com

I’ll be playing with formatting and themes for a while, but I’ve already imported my hikes from this blog that are on the 4,000 footer list.

The local Cisco office sent me such a nice invitation to the Cisco Expo Slovenia event that I simply had to register. So, if you’ll be in Portorož during the event and would like to join me for a cup of coffee or a beer (hopefully on a terrace overlooking the sea), get in touch ... or look for the guy asking nasty questions from the back row ;)

As we continue to look at the many interesting and unique employees that shape Cisco and make it the company it is today, our next highlighted employee is Erica Ganz, Executive Assistant to SVP Manny Rivelo. Erica has many great stories during her past three years working at Cisco, but her fondest memory of the company is actually during her first few months. She was only working at Cisco for three months when she found out she was pregnant and that there were complications with her pregnancy. Everyone at Cisco including her direct boss were incredibly supportive, understanding and helped her in anyway they could. Thankfully, the complications were not as serious as they originally thought and Erica’s daughter today is a happy 1 1/2 year old, but Erica will always take away what a tight-knit and family environment Cisco is.

A post in the My CCIE Training Guide pointed me to the GoogleTechTalk given by Yakov Rekhter (one of the fathers of BGP) in 2007. You should watch the whole video (it helps you understand numerous BGP implementation choices), but its most important message is undoubtedly the Design by Pragmatism approach:

• They had a simple, manageable problem (get from a spanning-tree Internet topology to a mesh topology).
• They did not want to solve all potential future problems.
• They started with simple specifications (three napkins), had two interoperable implementations in a few months, and wrote the RFC after BGP was already in production use.
• They rolled it out, learnt from its shortcomings and fixed it.
• They made it easily extensible: TLV encoding, optional attributes, capabilities negotiations. This approach made it possible to carry additional address families in BGP and use it for applications like MPLS VPN and VPLS.

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Many of you may not be aware that Cisco actually has a chief futurologist.  Well, meet Dave Evans from Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group who has this interesting remit.    Dave provides a fascinating view of some of the upcoming trends that technology could help enable in the near future, encapsulated in the concept of what he terms a coming technology avalanche.  There are several choices that people and business will face in addressing the phenomenon when it inevitably arrives.   Dave recommends riding it to success…

The Market trends in Service Provider networks webinar was obviously well received by the attendees ... the “only” problem was that there were so few of them. The conversion ratios were murderous:

• From over a hundred thousand visitors who have seen the webinar announcement, approximately 1% clicked on the registration link. This is normal and expected; most people are banner-blind and many visitors are not interested in the particular topic or don’t want to attend a webinar.
• Over a thousand visitors decided that the registration page is worth looking at, but only around 1% actually registered for the webinar. This ratio needs some serious fixing; increasing it by a few percentage points would make the whole idea viable.

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What if you had a chance to get a couple of workbooks that would help you stay sharp or prepare for the CCIE R&S lab?  Yup if you could get both Narbik’s Troubleshooting Workbook and the Advanced Routing and Switching 2.0 Workbook would that be a good deal?

FREE?

Oh that would be better, because free is always good.  If I also threw in an additional $1,000 discount to any of Micronics’ SP, RS or End-To-End classes that would be even better, right?  Well I try to stay on top of what future CCIEs and current CCIEs might want so here’s a great deal for you.

A CONTEST!

You bet, a contest to see who can complete 10 – 15 troubleshooting mock labs is afoot.  The window of opportunity for you is a short five (5) days to complete.  The first twenty (20) lucky people who do the best on these labs will be awarded both workbooks, Troubleshooting Workbook (written by Narbik and Dan) and the Advanced Routing and Switching 2.0 Workbook written by Narbik.  All that plus a $1,000 discount to any one of Micronics’ SP, RS or End-To-End classes, anywhere in the world.

ONLY 20 (TWENTY) LUCKY CONTESTANTS WILL BE AWARDED THESE FABULOUS PRIZES.                                                                       (I feel like a game show host!)

WHEN?

Next week I will roll out the announcement and the link to the mock labs and you are invited to, “Start your engines” race fans.

The fine print: If you have attended classes from Micronics you only have to pay $1,500 for future training, so don’t be greedy you will not be allowed to use the $1,000 discount offered in this competition against that price.

Cisco was recently named to the National Association for Female Executives’ (NAFE) list of Top 50 Companies for Executive Women. The list recognizes organizations whose policies and practices encourage women’s advancement and whose numbers at the highest levels of leadership demonstrate that commitment.

In the article that accompanied the list, NAFE highlighted our Inclusion Advocacy Program (IAP), which paired high-potential employees with senior executives from other business units, who not only mentor the individual, but also become an advocate for that person’s professional development.

When the friendly sales guy from your favorite vendor honors you with an “independent test lab” report on the newest wonderful gadget he’s trying to sell you, there’s one thing you can be sure of: the box behaves as described in the report. The “independent” labs are earning too much money verifying the test results to participate in outright lies. Whether the results correlate with your needs is a different story, but we’ll skip this discussion.

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