Introduction
All good things come to an end and so it is with Cisco Live London 2013. Friday’s sessions were a deep dive on the Nexus 1000v and one covering cloud architectures. Both were good and provided lots of useful information that I need to get up to speed on. The fact that my ears were still ringing from last night’s Customer Appreciation Event and I’ve started to lose my voice from singing along hasn’t dampened my spirits.
Thursday
Thursday saw me attending three sessions. The first was on tuning Cisco’s IPS. If you use an IPS, check this session out. It was the best one I’ve attended this week and you could feel the presenter’s passion for his work coming through. The second session was on SDN but it didn’t work for me and I called it a day after an hour and went off to do a LISP walk in lab which gave me a taste of what it looks like in the CLI. The last session on Thursday was an advanced BGP session, explaining some of the new features that are in the pipeline. It was a bit dry but contained some useful nuggets.
Bonus
Before the CAE kicked off, I got an email from Cisco saying I’d won a £100 Amazon voucher. All that swag collecting apparently had the side effect of collecting points in an accumulator. I’ll let you know this time next year if that voucher has helped offset the email spam that I am likely to receive.
Time to party
I skipped last year’s CAE to meet up with some folks at the Fox outside the Excel centre who didn’t have a ticket and others that I had met during the week. This year, there was news that the guest performer was a British rock legend and I felt like rocking out so turned up. The food and drink were both plentiful and there was lots of entertainment put on for us such as beach volleyball, surfing, bucking bronco, some crazy limbo dude and a helter skelter.
Music initially came in the form of a Bob Marley tribute band who were awesome. Then a band I’d not heard of called the RPJ band (Rick Parfitt Junior being the front man). Not sure if they do their own material but they stuck to covers of some classic tunes such as Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, The Killers’ ‘Mr Brightside’ and Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. I’d manoeuvred myself to the front row with my beer and enjoyed some head banging and foot stomping. The band were very entertaining.
I should have known from the warm up band who the rock icon was going to be…junior’s dad Rick Parfitt from ‘The Quo’. I’ll be honest. When he came out, I thought ‘oh dear’. A couple of strums in to one of the three chords he had brought with him however and I was rocking out. Staff came along the front with inflatable guitars to hand out and that was all I needed to have a great night. I looked across at senior at one point and he gave me a wry smile and nodded in appreciation of my air guitar. Bugger didn’t invite me on stage though. A soon as the music ended after a couple of great hours, I realised why I don’t tend to go to gigs anymore (at my age!)…persistent ringing in my ears. But it was worth it.
On the train back to the flat, I started to feel a little peckish so headed down Brick Lane for a nice hot curry washed down with a night-cap.
Summary
Cisco Live 2013 was a different beast from last year. I was doing sessions from 09:00-18:00 last year. I scaled back on them this year and spent far more time in the World of Solutions, getting to know products in more depth, both those that I knew something about and others that I didn’t previously have any knowledge on whatsoever.
The WiFi was vastly improved this year. Where I was frequently unable to connect in 2012, I suffered no such issues this time. Lunches and refreshments were spot on again. I’ve got some gym time to rack up methinks. It was great meeting up with a lot of other techies from all different fields and putting faces to Twitter handles etc. and I hope to keep in touch with them.
Thanks to everybody who helped make this such a fun and instructive event including Cisco, the exhibition staff and of course the attendees. I now have the seemingly impossible task of trying to get a spot for next year’s event in Milan. I’m going to go dark for a few days now and spend time with my family but I have some scaffolding in place for technical posts in the near future so keep your eyes peeled. The final good point for me to make about Cisco Live is the legacy effect it has on me. I’m raring to get back to studying to complete my CCNP Security, dive deeper on some data centre\virtualisation stuff and later in the year, take a long hard look at the CCIE.
Till the next time.