Well, Day two of Cisco Live 2011 for me (for some this is your first day as you are still arriving).

For me, I am taking an 8 hour Techtorial on Next Generation Data Center Infrastructure TECDCT-8001.  This is a paid seminar that has covered some great material – and probably help to generate some future blog posts as well!

Mike Herbert took the first part of the class and did a great review of some of the changes that have happened in the data center over the past few years. From the evolving 3-tier architecture with Spanning Tree and such all the way to Fabric Path and TRILL.  Nothing was really in depth but was a great setting of the stage for the day.  Some of the things that I liked was the discussion on the Data Center Standards and where different things are in the flow.  Another nice discussion was data center cabling and the potential future of cabling.  From the traditional home-run cabling that many of us use today to the discussion of top of rack (TOR) and end of row (EOR) drivers with regards to 10g and beyond cabling.  Problems discussed where primarily the cost of running those lengths of cables to the cross-talk potentials due to the power required to drive the data.  Oh yeah, Mike gets some bonus points for mentioning LISP during the presentation as well.

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