Software Defined Cars

Posted on June 17, 2013 by networkingnerd

CarLights

I think everything in the IT world has been tagged as “software defined” by this point. There’s software defined networking, software defined storage, the software defined data center, and so on. Given that the definitions of the things I just enumerated are very hard to nail down, it’s no surprise that many in the greater IT community just roll their eyes when they start hearing someone talk about SD.

I try to find ways to discuss advanced topics like this with people that may not understand what a hypervisor is or what a forwarding engine is really supposed to be doing. The analogies that I come up usually relate to everyday objects that are familiar to my readers. If I can frame the Internet as a highway and help people “get it,” then I’ve succeeded.

During one particularly interesting discussion, I started trying to relate SDN to the automobile. The car is a fairly stable platform that has been iterated upon many times in the 150 years that it has been around. We’ve seen steam-powered single seat models give way to 8+ passenger units capable of hauling tons of freight. It is a platform that is very much defined by the hardware. Engines and seating are the first things that spring to mind, but also wheels and cargo areas. The difference between a sports car and an SUV is very apparent due to hardware, much in the same way that a workgroup access switch only resembles a core data center switch in the most basic terms.

This got me to thinking: what would it take to software define a car? How could I radically change the thinking behind an automobile with software. At first, I thought about software programs running in the engine that assist the driver with things like fuel consumption or perhaps an on-demand traction and ride handling system. Those are great additional features for sure but they don’t really add anything to the base performance of a car beyond a few extra tweaks. Even the most advanced “programming” tools that are offered for performance specialists that allow for the careful optimization of transmission shifting patterns and fuel injector mixture recalibration don’t really fall into the software defined category. While those programs offer a way to configure the car in a manner different from the original intent they are difficult to operate and require a great deal of special knowledge to configure in the first place.

That’s when it hit me like a bolt out of the blue. We already have a software defined car. Google has been testing it for years. Only they call it a Driverless Car. Think about it in terms of our favorite topic of SDN. Google has taken the hardware that we are used to (the car) and replaced the control plane with a software construct (the robot steering mechanism). The software is capable of directing the forwarding of the hardware with no user intervention, as illustrated in this video:

That’s a pretty amazing feat when you think about it. Of course, programming a car to drive itself isn’t easy. There’s a ton of extra data that is generated as a car learns to drive itself that must be taken into account. In much the same way, the network is going to generate mountains of additional data that needs to be captured by some kind of sensor or management platform. That extra data represents the network feedback that allows you to do things like steer around obstacles, whether they be a deer in the road or a saturated uplink to a cloud provider.

In addition, the idea of a driverless software defined car is exciting because of the disruption that it represents. Once we don’t need a cockpit with a steering mechanism or access to propulsion mechanisms directly at our fingertips (or feet), we can go about breaking about the historical construction of a car and make it a more friendly concept. Why do I need to look forward when my car does all the work? Why can’t I twist the seats 90 degrees and facilitate conversation among passengers while the automation is occuring? Why can’t I put in an uplink to allow me to get work done or a phone to make calls now that my attention doesn’t need to be focused on the road? When the car is doing all the driving, there are a multitude of ideas that need to be reconsidered for how we design the automobile.

When I started bouncing this idea off of some people, Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) mentioned to me that some people would take issue with my idea of a software defined car because it’s a self-contained, closed ecosystem. What about a software defined network that collects data and provides for greater visibility to the management layer? Doesn’t it need to be a larger system in order to really take advantage of software definition? That’s the beauty of the software defined piece. Once we have a vehicle generating large amounts of actionable data, we can now collect that and do something with it. Google has traffic data in their Maps application. What if that data was being fed in real time by the cars themselves? What if the car could automatically recognize traffic congestion and reroute on the fly instead of merely suggesting that the driver take an alternate path? What if we could load balance our highway system efficiently because the car is getting real time data about conditions. Now Google has the capability to use their software defined endpoints to reconfigure as needed.

What if that same car could automatically sense that you were driving to the airport and check you into your flight based on arrival time without the need to intervene? How about inputting a destination, such as a restaurant or a sporting event and having the car instantly reserve a parking spot near the venue based on reports from cars already in the lot or from sensors that report the number of empty spots in a parking garage nearby? The possibilities are really limitless even in this first or second stage. The key is that we capture the generated data from the software pieces that we install on top of existing hardware. We never knew we could do this because the interface into the data never existed prior to creating a software layer that we could interact with. When you look at what Google has already done with their recent acquisition of Waze, the social GPS and map application it does look like Google is starting down this path. Why rely on drivers to update the Waze database when the cars can do it for you?

Tom’s Take

I have spent a very large portion of my IT career driving to and from customer sites. The idea of a driverless car is appealing, but it doesn’t really help me to just sit over in the passenger seat and watch a computer program do my old job. I still like driving long distances to a certain extent. I don’t want to lose that. It’s when I can start using the software layer to enable things that I never thought possible that I start realizing the potential. Rather than just looking as the driverless software defined car as a replacement for drivers, the key is to look at the potential that it unlocks to be more efficient and make me more productive on the road. That’s the key take away for us all. Those lessons can also be applied to the world of software defined networking/storage/data center as well. We just have to remember to look past the hype and marketing and realize what the future holds in store.

Dell Enterprise Forum and the VRTX of Change

Posted on June 13, 2013 by networkingnerd

I was invited by Dell to be a part of their first ever Enterprise Forum. You may remember this event from the past when it was known as Dell Storage Forum, but now that Dell has a bevy of enterprise-focused products in their portfolio a name change was in order. The Enterprise Forum still had a fair amount of storage announcements. There was also discussion about networking and even virtualization. One thing seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue from the moment it was unveiled on Tuesday morning.

VRTX

Say hello to Dell’s newest server platform – VRTX (pronounced “vertex”). The VRTX is a shift away from the centralized server clusters that you may be used to seeing from companies like Cisco, HP, or IBM. Dell has taken their popular m1000 blade units and pulled them into an enclosure that bears more than a passing resemblance to the servers I deployed five or six years ago. The VRTX is capable of holding up to 4 blade servers in the chassis alongside either 12 3.5″ hard drives or 25 2.5″ drives, for a grand total of up to 48 TB of storage space. What sets VRTX apart from other similar designs, like the IBM S-class BladeCenter of yore, is the ability for expansion.

Rather than just sliding a quad-port NIC into the mezzanine slot and calling it a day, Dell developed VRTX to expand to meet future needs of customers. That’s why you’ll find 8 PCIe slots in VRTX (3 full height, 5 half height). That’s the real magic in this system. For example, the VRTX ships today with 8 1GbE ports for network connectivity. While 10GbE is slated for a future release you could slide in a 10GbE PCIe card and attach it to a blade if needed to gain connectivity. You could also put in a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) and gain more expansion for your on-board storage. In the future, you could even push that to 40GbE or maybe one of those super fast PCIe SSD cards from a company like Fusion-IO. The key is that the PCIe slots give you a ton of expandability in such a small form factor instead of limiting you to whatever mezzanine card or expansion adapter has been blessed by the skunkworks labs for your supplying server vendor.

VRTX doesn’t come without a bit of controversy. Dell has positioned this system as a remote office/branch office (ROBO) solution that combines everything you would need to turn up a new site into one shippable unit. That follows along with comments made at a keynote talk on the third day about Dell believing that compute power has reached a point where it will no longer grow at the same rate. Dell’s solution to the issue is to push more compute power to the edge instead of centralizing it in the data center. What you lose in manageability you gain in power.

The funny thing for me was looking at VRTX and seeing the solution to a small scale data center problem I had for many years. The schools I used to serve didn’t need an 8 or 10-slot blade chassis. They didn’t need two Compellent SANs with data tiering and failover. They needed a solution to virtualize their aging workloads onto a small box built for their existing power and cooling infrastructure. VRTX fits the bill just fine. It uses 110v power. The maximum of four blades fits just perfectly with VMware‘s Essentials bundle for cheap virtualization with the capability to expand if needed later on. Everything is the same as the enterprise-grade hardware that’s being used in other solutions, just in a more SMB-friendly box. Plus, the entry level price target of $10,000 in a half-loaded configuration fits the budget conscious needs of a school or small office.

If there is one weakness in the first iteration of VRTX it comes from the software side of things. VRTX doesn’t have any software beyond what you load on it. It will run VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, or any manner of server software you want to install. There’s no software to manage the platform, though. Without that, VRTX is a standalone system. If you truly wanted to use it as a “pay as you grow” data center solution, you need to find a way to expand the capabilities of the system linearly as you expand the node count. As a counterpoint to this, take a look at Nutanix. Many storage people at Enterprise Forum were calling the VRTX the “Dell Nutanix” solution. You can watch an overview of what Nutanix is doing from a session at Storage Field Day 2 last November:

The key difference is that Nutanix has a software management program that allows their nodes to scale out when a new node is added. That is what Dell needs to work on developing to harness the power that VRTX represents. Dell developed this as a ROBO solution yet no one I talked to saw it that way. They saw this as a building block for a company starting their data center build out. What’s needed is the glue to stitch two or more VRTX systems together. Harnessing the power of multiple discrete compute units is a very important part of breaking through all the barriers discussed at the end of Enterprise Forum.

Tom’s Take

Bigger is better. Except when it’s not. Sometimes good things really do come in small packages. Considering that Dell’s VRTX was a science project for the last four years being built as a proof-of-concept I’d say that Dell has finally achieved one thing they’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s hard to compete against HP and IBM due to their longevity and entrenchment in the blade server market. Now, Dell has a smaller blade server that customers are clamoring to buy to fill needs that aren’t satisfied by bigger boxes. The missing ingredient right now is a way to tie them all together. If Dell can mulitplex their resources together they stand an excellent chance of unseating the long-standing titans of blade compute. And that’s a change worth fighting for.

Disclaimer

I was invited to attend Dell Enterprise Forum at the behest of Dell. They paid for my travel and lodging expenses while on site in San Jose. They also provided a Social Media Influencer pass to the event. At no time did they place any requirements on my attendance or participation in this event. They did not request that any posts be made about the event. They did not ask for nor where they granted any kind of consideration in the writing of this or any other Dell Enterprise Forum post.

Tech Field Day 9

Posted on June 10, 2013 by networkingnerd

It’s hard to believe that the last Tech Field Day event was held almost two years ago. Since the, the Field Day series has branched out to cover topics like Networking, Storage, and Wireless. The industry never stands still for long, however. The stars aligned and the sponsors asked to bring back the granddaddy of them all. That’s why I’m happy to announce that I’ll be attending Tech Field Day 9 from June 19-21 in Austin, TX.

There’s an all-star lineup of previous Field Day attendees with a couple of new folks sprinkled in to keep things lively:

	Alastair Cooke	@DemitasseNZ
	Trainer, Writer, Consultant, Geek. From New Zealand.
	Bob Plankers	@Plankers
	A hardcore IT generalist, virtualization expert, blogger, and vocal end user of technology.
	Carlo Costanzo	@CCostan
	Carlo is a NYC based Virtualization Consultant. He writes about whatever interests him at the time @ vCloudInfo.com
	Chris Wahl	@ChrisWahl
	The guy who is in your data center virtualizing things
	Howard Marks	@DeepStorageNet
	Storage Analyst Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
	John Obeto	@JohnObeto
	I like SMBs and Windows
	Justin Warren	@JPWarren
	The Anablogger: Old-school, long-form analysis with an irreverent twist.
	Matthew Norwood	@MatthewNorwood

	Robert Novak	@Gallifreyan
	Writer, Photographer, System Administrator, Team Builder, Cat Herder, Comedian, Part-Time Shopkeeper
	Ryan Adzima	@RAdzima
	Ryan is an enterprise technology generalist with a tendency to always end up back in networking.
	Scott D. Lowe	@OtherScottLowe

	Tony Mattke	@Tonhe
	network engineer / geek

The delegates are some of the best and brightest across the networking, server, and storage industries. Which is quite fitting when you consider the sponsors that are coming your way and how the represent the new trend in converged data centers:

In particular, Infinio is an exciting edition to the Tech Field Day series. They will be launching during their presentation slot, so I’m sure they’re going to have a very interesting take on their topic.

Tech Field Day 9 is also a transition point for me personally. For the first time, I’ll be attending the event as both a delegate AND a staff member. Now that I’m a full-time employee of Foskett Services and Gestalt IT I’m going to split my time between listening to the presenters and making sure that everything is running smoothly in the background. It’s going to be a challenge to try and keep up with everything, but I feel that I’m more than capable of making every aspect of this event outstanding.

What’s Field Day Like?

Tech Field Day is not a vacation. This event will involve starting a day early first thing Wednesday morning and running full steam for two and a half days. We get up early and retire late. Wall-to-wall meetings and transportation to and from vendors fill the days. When you consider that most of the time we’re discussing vendors and presentations on the car ride to the next building, there’s very little downtime. We’ve been known to have late night discussions about converged storage networking and automation until well after midnight. If that’s your idea of a “vacation” then Tech Field Day is a paradise. I usually crawl onto a plane late Friday night mentally and physically exhausted with a head full of blog posts and ideas. It’s not unlike the same kind of feeling you get after running a marathon. You don’t know if you could do it again tomorrow, but you can’t wait until the next one.

Tech Field Day – Join In Now!

Everyone at home is as much a participant in Tech Field Day as the delegates on site. At the last event we premiered the ability to watch the streaming video from the presentations on mobile devices. This means that you can tune in from just about anywhere now. There’s no need to stay glued to your computer screen. If you want to tune in to our last presentations of the day from the comfort of your couch with your favorite tablet device then feel free by all means. We’ll also have the videos from the session posted quickly afterwards on Youtube and Vimeo. If you have to run to the store for ice cream or catch that playoff game you can always catch up with what’s going on when you get back. Don’t forget that you can also use Twitter to ask questions and make comments about what you’re seeing and hearing. Some of the best questions I’ve seen came from the home audience. Use the hashtag #TFD9 during the event. Note that I’ll be tagging the majority of my tweets that week with #TFD9, so if the chatter is getting overwhelming you can always mute or filter that tag.

Standard Tech Field Day Sponsor Disclaimer

Tech Field Day is a massive undertaking that involves the coordination of many moving parts. It’s not unlike trying to herd cats with an aircraft carrier. One of the most important pieces is the sponsors. Each of the presenting companies is responsible for paying a portion of the travel and lodging costs for the delegates. This means they have some skin in the game. What this does NOT mean is that they get to have a say in what we do. No Tech Field Day delegate is every forced to write about the event due to sponsor demands. If a delegate chooses to write about anything they see at Tech Field Day, there are no restrictions about what can be said. Sometimes this does lead to negative discussion. That is entirely up to the delegate. Independence means no restrictions. At times, some Tech Field Day sponsors have provided no-cost evaluation equipment to the delegates. This is provided solely at the discretion of the sponsor and is never a requirement. This evaluation equipment is also not a contingency of writing a review, be it positive or negative. The delegates are in this for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

If you’d like to learn more about what makes Tech Field Day so special, please check out the website at http://techfieldday.com. If you want to be a part of Tech Field Day, don’t hesitate to fill out the nomination form to become a delegate. We’re always on the lookout for great people to become a part of the event and we’d love to have you along for the ride.

Glue Peddlers

Posted on June 6, 2013 by networkingnerd

IntegrationGlue

There’s an old adage that says “A chain is only as strong as the weakest link.” While people typically use this in terms on saying that teams are only as strong as their weakest member, I look at it through a different lens. In my former life as a Value Added Reseller (VAR) engineer, I spent a lot of my time working with technologies that needed to be linked together like a chain.

You have probably seen the lamentations of a voice engineer complaining about fax machines. If you haven’t, you should count yourself lucky. Fax machines are the bane of the lives of many telecom folks. They aren’t that difficult when you get right down to it. They’re essentially printers with a 9600 baud modem attached for making phone calls. Indeed, fax machines are probably one of the most robust pieces of technology that I’ve encountered. I’ve seen faxes covered in dust and grime from a decade or more of use still dutifully churning out page after page of low resolution black-and-white print.

Faxes themselves aren’t the issue. The problem is that their technology has been eclipsed to the point where interfacing them in the modern world is often difficult and time consuming. I usually counsel my customers to leave their fax machines plugged directly into an analog landline to avoid issues. For those times where that can’t be done, I have a whole bag of tricks to make it work with a voice over IP (VoIP) system. Adaptors and relays and other such tricks help me figure out how to make this decades-old tech work with a modern PRI or SIP connection. And don’t even get me started on interfacing a fire alarm with an IP phone system.

The best VARs in the world don’t make their money from reselling a pile of hardware to a customer. The profits aren’t found in a bill of materials. Instead, they make money in the glue business. Tying two disparate technologies together via custom programming or knowledge of processes needed to make dissimilar technology work the right way is their real trade. This is their “glue.” I can remember having discussions with people regarding the hardest parts of an implementation. It’s not in setting up a dial plan or configuring a VM cluster with the right IP address. It’s usually in making some old piece of technology work correctly. A fire alarm or a Novell server or an ancient wireless access point can quickly become the focus area of an entire project and consume all your time.

If you really want to differentiate yourself from the pack of “box pushers” out there just reselling equipment you need to concentrate on the point where the glue needs to be the stickiest. That’s where the customer’s knowledge is the weakest. That’s the point that will end up causing the most pain. That’s where the money is waiting for the truly dedicated. VARs have already figured this out. If you want to make yourself valuable to a customer or to a VAR, be the best a gluing these technologies together. Understand how to make old technology work with new tech. There’s always going to be new technology coming out to replace what’s being used currently. And there will always be a customer or two that want to keep using that old technology far past the expiration date. If you are the one that can tie those too things together with a minimum of effort, you’ll find yourself the most popular peddler in the market.

The Arse First Method of Technical Blogging – Review

Posted on June 3, 2013 by networkingnerd

When you tell people that you are a blogger, you tend to get a couple of generic responses. The first is laughter or dismissal. Some people just don’t understand how you can write all the time. The second response if curiosity. Usually, this is expressed as a torrent of questions about how to blog. What do I write about? How much should I write? How often should I post? And on and on. For those of us that have been blogging long enough, it’s almost a wrote recitation of our standards and practices for blogging. Some people have even been smart enough to turn that standard reply into a blog post. For Greg Ferro, it was time to turn that blog post into an e-book:

Cheeky, isn’t it? Weighing in at a svelte 37 pages, this little how-to guide details many of Greg’s secrets for writing blog posts over his career. He talks about tools for screen captures and knowledge archiving. He also discusses hosting options and content creation. To the novice blogger, it’s a step-by-step guide in how to get started in blogging. I would highly recommend picking it up if you aren’t sure how to get started in technical blogging, which is remarkably different than blogging about food or pictures or any other non-technical thing.

The Catch

The funny thing about this book is that, while reading more and more of it, I realized that I violate almost every one of Greg’s recommendations for writing a technical blog. My opening paragraphs are more like story hooks. I don’t use a lot of bullet points. I like putting pictures in my posts. There are many others that I ignore on a pretty regular basis as well. But don’t think that means that I don’t appreciate what Greg is trying to do with his book.

Greg writes like he speaks in real life. He doesn’t mince words. He’s not in love with the sound of his voice. He’s going to give it to you straight when you ask him a question. His blogging style is totally reflective of his speaking style. On the other hand, my blogging style is indicative of my speaking style as well. I like telling stories and relating things back to universal images through metaphors. I tend to expound on subjects and give more details to support my arguments rather than restricting that to a simple bulleted statement. People that read Greg’s blog posts and my blog posts would likely be able to pick out which of us authored a particular post. That’s because we have our own voices.

Greg’s book is a great way to get started with technical blogging. After you get your first couple of posts down, it’s important to think about finding your voice. You may like using lots of pictures or video. You may prefer to keep it short and sweet with the occasional code example. The key is find a style that works for you and stick with it. Once you find a comfortable writing style you’ll find yourself writing more often and about more complex subjects. When you aren’t worried about getting the words down on paper you’re free to dive right into things that are going to take a lot of thought.

The recommended price of this book is $4.99. If that scares you off, you can pick it up for just $2.99. For the price of a candy bar and a 20oz soda, you can learn a little more about blogging and using tools to amplify your writing ability. If nothing else, you can read through it so you know how Greg thinks when he’s writing down information about things. You can purchase The Arse First Method of Technical Blogging at https://leanpub.com/Technical-Blogging-Writing-Arse-First. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

CCIE Loses Its Voice

Posted on May 30, 2013 by networkingnerd

cciev The world we live in is constantly adapting and changing to new communications methods. I can still remember having a party line telephone when I was a kid. I’ve graduated to using landlines, cellular phones, email, instant messaging, text messaging, and even the occasional video call. There are more methods to contact people than I can count on both hands. This change is also being reflected in the workforce as well. People who just a few years ago felt comfortable having a desk phone and simple voice mail are now embracing instant messaging with presence integration and unified voice mail as well as single number reach to their mobile devices. It’s a brave new world that a voice engineer is going to need to understand in depth.

To that end, Cisco has decided to retire the CCIE Voice in favor of an updated track that will be christened the CCIE Collaboration. Note that they aren’t merely changing the blueprint like they have in the past with the CCIE SP or the CCIE R&S. This is like the CCIE Storage being moved aside for the CCIE Data Center. The radical shift in content of the exam should be a tip-off to the candidates that this isn’t going to be the same old voice stuff with a few new bells and whistles.

Name That Tune

The lab equipment and software list (CCO account required) includes a bump to CUCM 9.1 for the call processor, as well as various 9.x versions of Unity Connection, Presence, and CUCME. There’s also a UCS C460, which isn’t too surprising with CUCM being a virtualized product now. The hardware is rounded out with 2921 and 3925 routers as well as a 3750-X switch. The most curious inclusion is the Cisco Jabber Video for Telepresence. That right there is the key to the whole “collaboration” focus on this exam. There is a 9971 phone listed as an item. I can almost guarantee you’re going to have to make a video call from the 9971 to the video soft client in Cisco Jabber. That’s all made possible thanks to Cisco’s integration of video in CUCM in 9.1. This has been their strategy all along.

The CCIE Voice is considered one of the hardest certifications to get, even among the CCIE family. It’s not that there is any one specific task to configure that just wrecks candidates. The real issue is the amount of tasks that must be configured. Especially when you consider that a simple 3-point task to get the remote site dial plan up and running could take a couple of hours of configuration. Add in the integrated troubleshooting section that requires you to find a problem after you’ve already configured it incorrectly and you can see why this monster is such a hard test. One has to wonder what adding video and other advanced topics like presence integration into the lab is going to do to the amount of time the candidate has to configure things. It was already hard to get done in 8 hours. I’m going to guess it’s downright impossible to do it in the CCIE Collaboration. My best guess is that you are going to see versions of the test that are video-centric as well as ones that are voice-centric. There’s going to be a lot of overlap between the two, but you can’t go into the lab thinking you’re guaranteed to get a video lab.

Hitting the Wrong Notes

There also seems to have been a lot of discussion about the retirement of the CCIE Voice track as opposed to creating a CCIE Voice version 4 track with added video. In fact, there are some documents out there related to the CCIE Collaboration that reference a CCIE Voice v4. The majority of discussion seems to be around the CCIE Voice folks getting “grandfathered” into a CCIE Collaboration title. While I realize that the change in the name was mostly driven about the marketing of the greater collaboration story, I still don’t think that there should be any automatic granting of the Collaboration title.

The CCIE Collaboration is a different test. While the blueprint may be 75% the same, there’s still the added video component to take into account (as well as cluster configuration for multiple CUCM servers). People want an upgrade test to let the CCIE Voice become a CCIE Collaboration. They have one already: the CCIE Collaboration lab exam. If the title is that important, you should take that lab exam and pass it to earn your new credential. The fact that there is precedent for this with the migration of the Storage track to Data Center shows that Cisco wants to keep the certifications current and fresh. While Routing & Switching and Security see content refreshes, they are still largely the same at the core. I would argue that the CCIE Collaboration will be a different exam in feel, even if not in blueprint or technology. The focus on IM, presence and video means that there’s going to be an entirely different tone. Cisco wants to be sure that the folks displaying the credential are really certified to work on it according to the test objectives. I can tell you that there was serious consideration around allowing Storage candidates to take some sort of upgrade exam to get to the CCIE Data Center, but it looks like that was ultimately dropped in favor of making everyone go through the curriculum. The retirement of the CCIE Voice doesn’t make you any less of a CCIE. Like it or not, it looks like the only way to earn the CCIE Collaboration is going to be in the trenches.

It Ain’t Over Until…

The sunsetting officially starts on November 20th, 2013. That’s the last day to take the CCIE Voice written. Starting the next day (the 21st) you can only take the Collaboration written exam. Thankfully, you can use either the Voice written or the Collaboration written exam to qualify for either lab. That’s good until February 13, 2014. That’s the last day to take the CCIE Voice lab. Starting the next day (Valentine’s Day 2014), you will only be able to take the Collaboration lab exam. If you want to get an idea of what is going to be tested on the lab exam, check out the document on the Cisco Learning Network (CCO account required).

If you’d like to read more about the changes from professional CCIE trainers, check out Vik Malhi (@vikmalhi) on IPExpert’s blog. You can also read Mark Snow’s (@highspeedsnow) take on things at INE’s blog.

Tom’s Take

Nothing lasts forever, especially in the technology world. New gadgets and methods come out all the time to supplant the old guard. In the world of communications and collaboration, Cisco is trying to blaze a trail towards business video as well as showing the industry that collaboration is more than just a desk phone and a voice mailbox. That vision has seen some bumps along the way but Cisco seems to have finally decided on a course. That means that the CCIE Voice has reached the apex of potential. It is high time for something new and different to come along and push the collaboration agenda to the logical end. Cisco has already created a new CCIE to support their data center ambitions. I’m surprised it took them this long to bring business video and non-voice communications to the forefront. While I am sad to see the CCIE Voice fade away, I’m sure the CCIE Collaboration is going to be a whole new barrel of fun.

The Microsoft Office Tablet

Posted on May 28, 2013 by networkingnerd

OfficeTablet I’ve really tried to stay out of the Tablet Wars. I have a first generation iPad that I barely use any more. My kids have co-opted it from me for watching on-demand TV shows and playing Angry Birds. Since I spend most of my time typing blog posts or doing research, I use my laptop more than anything else. When the Surface RT and Surface Pro escaped from the wilds of Redmond I waited and watched. I wanted to see what people were going to say about these new Microsoft tablets. It’s been about 4 months since the release of the Surface Pro and simliar machines from vendors like Dell and Asus. I’ve been slowly asking questions and collecting information about these devices. And I think I’ve finally come to a realization.

The primary reason people want to buy a Surface tablet is to run Microsoft Office.

Here’s the setup. Everyone that expressed an interest in the Pro version of the Surface (or the Latitude 10 from Dell) was asked a question by me: What is the most compelling feature for the Surface Pro for you? The responses that I got back were overwhelming in their similarity.

1. I want to use Microsoft Office on my tablet.

2. I want to run full Windows apps on my tablet.

I never heard anything about portability, power, user interface, or application support (beyond full Windows apps). I specifically excluded the RT model of the Surface from my questions because of the ARM processor and the reliance of software from the Windows App Store. The RT functions more like Apple/Android tablets in that regard.

This made me curious. The primary goal of Surface users is to be able to run Office? These people have basically told me that the only reason they want to buy a tablet is to use an office suite. One that isn’t currently available anywhere else for mobile devices. One that has been rumored to be released on other platforms down the road. While it may be a logical fallacy, it appears that Microsoft risks invalidating a whole hardware platform because of a single application suite. If they end up releasing Office for iOS/Android, people would flee from the Surface to the other platforms according to the info above. Ergo, the only purpose of the Surface appears to be to run one application. Which I why I’ve started calling it the Microsoft Office Tablet. Then I started wondering about the second most popular answer in my poll.

Making Your Flow Work

As much as I’ve tried not to use the word “workflow” before, I find that it fits in this particular conversation. Your workflow is more than just the applications you utilize. It’s how you use them. My workflow looks totally different from everyone else even though I use simliar applications. I use email and word processing for my own purposes. I write a lot, so a keyboard of some kind is important to my workflow. I don’t do a lot of graphics design, so a pen input tablet isn’t really a big deal to me. The list goes on and on, but you see that my needs are my own and not those of someone else. Workflows may be simliar, but not identical. That’s where the dichotomy comes into play for me.

When people start looking at using a different device for their workflow, they have to make adjustments of some kind. Especially if that device is radically different from one they’ve been using before. Your phone is different from a tablet, and a tablet is different from a laptop. Even a laptop is different from a desktop, but these two are more simliar than most. When the time comes to adjust your workflow to a new device, there are generally two categories of people:

1. People who adjust their workflow to the new device.

2. People who expect the device to conform to their existing workflow.

For users of the Apple and Android tablets, option 1 is pretty much the only option you’ve got. That’s because the workflow you’ve created likely can’t be easily replicated between devices. Desktop apps don’t run on these tablets. When you pick up an iPad or a Galaxy Tab you have to spend time finding apps to replicate what you’ve been doing previously. Note taking apps, web browsing apps, and even more specialized apps like banking or ebook readers are very commonly installed. Your workflow becomes constrained to the device you’re using. Things like on-screen keyboards or lack of USB ports become bullet points in workflow compatibility. On occasion, you find that a new workflow is possible with the device. The prime example I can think of is using the camera on a phone in conjunction with a banking app to deposit checks without needing to take them into the bank. That workflow would have been impossible just a couple of years ago. With the increase in camera phone resolution, high speed data transfer, and secure transmission of sensitive data made possible by device advancements we can now picture this new workflow and easily adapt it because a device made it possible.

The other category is where the majority of Surface Pro users come in. These are the people that think their workflow must work on any device they use. Rather than modify what they’re doing, they want the perfect device to do their stuff. These are the people that use a tablet for about a week and then move on to something different because “it just didn’t feel right.” When they finally do find that magical device that does everything they want, they tend to abandon all other devices and use it exclusively. That is, until they have a new workflow or a substantial modification to their existing workflow. Then they go on the hunt for a new device that’s perfect for this workflow.

So long as your workflow is the immutable object in the equation, you are never going to be happy with any device you pick. My workflows change depending on my device. I browse Twitter and read email from my phone but rarely read books. I read books and do light web surfing from a tablet but almost never create content. I spend a lot of time creating content on my laptop buy hate reading on it. I’ve adjusted my workflows to suit the devices I’m using.

If the single workflow you need to replicate on your table revolves around content creation, I think it’s time to examine exactly what you’re using a tablet for. Is it portability beyond what a laptop can offer? Do you prefer to hunt and peck around a touch screen instead of a keyboard? Are you looking for better battery life or some other function of the difference in hardware? Or are you just wanting to look cool with a tablet in the “post PC world?” That’s the primary reason I don’t use a tablet that much any more. My workflows conform to my phone and my laptop. I don’t find use in a tablet. Some people love them. Some people swear by them. Just make sure you aren’t dropping $800-$1000 on a one-application device.

At the end of the day, work needs to get done. People are going to use whatever device they want to use to get their stuff done. Some want to do stuff and move on. Others want to look awesome doing stuff or want to do their stuff everywhere no matter what. Use what works best for you. Just don’t be surprised if complaining about how this device doesn’t run my favorite data entry program gets a sideways glance from IT.

Disclaimer: I own a first generation iPad. I’ve tested a Dell Latitude 10. I currently use an iPhone 4S. I also use a MacBook Air. I’ve used a Lenovo Thinkpad in the past as my primary workstation. I’m not a hater of Microsoft or a lover of Apple. I’ve found a setup that lets me get my job done.

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