Conferences

as you probably know already, next, jubilee edition of PLNOG is just around the corner. apart from stand and presentations, we’re be there with extended team to discuss our new products and solutions. and traditionally, we’ll also conduct couple of workshops for people interested in Cisco solutions: Advanced BGP workshops Deploying IPv6 MPLS basics one novelty we’ll offer is first of a kind offering in Poland - service provider design workshop. we’ll deliver it together with Piotr Jabłoński, experienced Cisco Advanced Services consultant. given you’ll be there for PLNOG - it’s good opportunity to get some additional perspective on technologies and discuss your experiences as well. we’ll go way above just delivering slides or implementing configurations - sharing with you real-life experiences from projects in Poland and abroad. ...

we’re back with Cisco security focused conference in the fall. during Cisco SECURE 2012 we’ll try to demonstrate you the whole security architecture. during two full days of presentations, we’ll try to showcase you all interesting bits and pieces from our portfolio. we already have agenda up, and i’ll be happy to present along Gaweł our security solutions for cloud and data centers - including CSR 1000v, ASAv and other interesting products. ...

seventh edition of PLNOG just finished, but what’s more - we just did deliver also first edition of new project - EURONOG. during last three days we’ve had a lot of presentations, discussions, Q&A sessions and discussion panels. see you during next conferences!

“Cisco eats in own dog food” or as you may elite-write-it: c15c0 d06 f00d. we announced participation in ISOC IPv6 day as a first vendor. some parts of our infrastructure serve IPv6 natively, but that’s a great opportunity to test it at scale - including hardware and software for systems that’s used for our internal and Customer services. among other things we’re testing AnyConnect 3.0 with native IPv6 support (public version is going to be available in couple of months), ACE 3.0 service cards for load-balancing, and firewall systems (ASA-SM service cards and ASA 5585-X). ...

i’d like to thank everyone that was part of last PLNOG edition. we introduced education track - that was your idea, voiced in chats and in surveys. it seems that the idea was right, so on september PLNOG edition we’ll continue with MPLS and QoS. also according to announcements, we did joint session with Rafał about architecture of ethernet switches and IP routers. i hope you liked it. we still miss real life use case sessions provided by you - service providers. we’ll gladly make room for both success stories as well as failure talks - everything that can be useful for others. ...

for some time Jim Gettys on his blog is writing a lot about problems caused by buffers, queues and other congestion avoidance mechanisms. you should really read about them. especially, if you’re in this group that believes big buffers solve all of the problems, and dropping traffic is absolute evil. nowadays it should be treated as absolutely normal thing - in most of the real life cases. on the upcoming, sixth PLNOG we may be able to tackle this problem (if there will be space in agenda), and have a shot at myths and legends related to network QoS. and yes, agenda will be out there soon, we’re just closing down last preparations. ...

i was stubborn - and while from the very first moment we’ve had a lot of challenges with the hotel infrastructure, i was able to run xTR routers during last PLNOG for LISP. no, it’s not about programming Cisco routers with LISP, but about new concept of Location/ID Split, that is new concept enabling you to treat traffic engineering in internet differently. in short - we still serve traffic like we always did (backward compatibility), but by assigning users and companies IPv4 and IPv6 addressing from special pools, we can treat this traffic in a different manner. LISP is de facto overlay network concept. this itself is nothing revolutionary, but on the other hand - it’s first such network that got wide adoption in world-wide internet. why would you like to use LISP? apart from ability to conserve IP addresses, LISP gives you ability to do traffic engineering without use of BGP or involving third parties. and in effect, adopting it may mean less FIB space needed on core internet routers. ...

during upcoming PLNOG i’ll cover two relatively new features available in Cisco gear. LISP which stands for Locator/ID SPlit is first, deployed and available both commercially and as open source code) solution that can enable internet to scale out without further growth of routing table size. it also brings advanced traffic engineering capabilities to pure IP networks. LISP was invented and is being actively developed by Cisco employees, working in different teams across research and development departaments. architecture itself is however open and fully documented. it’s very universal, and provides additional ability to merge IPv4 and IPv6 or provide seamless coexistence. it also supports multicast. LISP is not only interesting tool or vendor trick, right now it is being used by Google and Facebook. what’s actually interesting in Facebook case, during last major outage of interatlantic links, some of the internet accessing Facebook was accessing it over LISP proxy http://www.lisp4.facebook.com - in fully transparent, and essentially invisible for typical user way. LISP is also obviously used by Cisco and being integrated into our products. ...

fifth PLNOG edition is coming in on 21st and 22nd of october this year. this time we’ll have Merike Kaeo delivering keynote session. her topic of choice? security - suprising, isn’t it? :P as you can imagine we’re buttoning up agenda and it will be published soon. in the meantime, we already have over 200 attendees registered, which is great result given you still don’t know what you’ll be able to see :) ...

plnog, plnog and… gone. it looks like we have actually grown into the most serious and largest independent conference dedicated to people working on service provider networks in Poland - though I’m not going to fight anyone on the number of participants, this additional 100 people on each subsequent edition of PLNOG (we counted 395 participants this time!) speaks for itself. to the point that I’ve met many people for the first time in my life :) ...