Introduction
I was fortunate enough to have recently been invited to a Cisco event in Glasgow. It ran over 1.5 days and was broken down in to several sessions ranging from 15 minutes to three hours. This was a free event for attendees but I’m assuming with venue costs, materials and staffing, it wasn’t cheap for Cisco to host. Not that I’ll feel sorry for them, but with a number of these type of events being lined up over the coming months, I guess it will add up.
Day 1
The morning contained no less than five sessions:
- IPv4 exhaustion and implications
- IPv6 notation and address types
- Address planning
- IPv6 routing
- Transition mechanisms
So far, so good. Some of this was revision for me, however the address planning section was a key reason for my attendance as I wanted to make sure the plan we had back at the office wasn’t heading off down the wrong track. Lunch was provided but as we were over running a little, we risked indigestion by wolfing it down and getting back down to the good stuff.
The afternoon was supposed to be:
- Presentation from a new start-up, PresenceOrb, on how they have embraced IPv6
- Cisco IT giving us insight in to how they deployed IPv6
- Three hours of hand-on labs
Or at least that was the plan. About 15 minutes before the end of Khalid Jawaid’s excellent discussion re. Cisco IT, the fire alarm went off and, due to it being genuine, we lost 90 minutes stood outside on the pavement. Well, perhaps 60 minutes and the remainder in a local coffee shop. Upon returning to the training room we got the tail end of Khalid’s presentation but then only had an hour of the hand’s on labs. Thankfully, we were given the lab instructions so I am able to continue the lab at home.
Day 2
This was just a half day and covered five sessions:
- Presentation from a consultancy firm, Farrpoint
- A more in depth look at the current state of the IPv6 landscape
- Discussion of IPv6 security and comparison to IPv4
- Application demo of IPv6 connectivity in mobile devices
- Final Q&A session
The IPv6 landscape presentation was given by Steve Simlo, Product Manager for IPv6 in Cisco Systems. I found it to be of great value, especially the online resources that were shared. Steve is also a Manchester City fan so he really knows his stuff 😉
The security discussion was, as you would expect, a little dry, but covered a wide range of topics and had a good IPv4 comparison thrown in. The demonstration was finally left out, which didn’t really bother anybody as it left more time for the Q&A session.
Summary
Overall, I was really impressed with this event. It ticked several boxes for me:
- Free. OK, I don’t usually stump up cash for these but being free meant my work were more obliging in letting me attend
- Higher number of shorter sessions. I get easily bored on most five day training courses, unless the trainer is at the top of their game. 15-60 minute sessions can be much more productive
- High quality presenters. The Cisco guys were excellent, presenting well and knew the material. Very impressive. The two guest speakers were also good and there was very little in the way of a sales pitch from them
- High quality advice. Outside of the sessions themselves, I was able to grab the Cisco experts and get some nitty gritty details out of them. You can’t beat face to face interaction for getting that kind of useful information
I think Cisco hit the nail on the head with this event. The topic itself is getting more pertinent with each IPv4 address that gets used up and its good to see an industry giant getting a wide range of people (approximately 50 attendees) all thinking about moving forward with IPv6 adoption.
Till the next time.