Business Aspects of Networking Technologies
Overall rating: 4.67 Instructor: 4.81 Materials: 4.74 more …
Whenever we’re discussing new networking technologies, we tend to focus on interesting technical details instead of stepping back and asking ourselves questions like “How will this technology make our business more efficient” and “Is our business ready to get the most out of our potential investment?”
Likewise, when we design a network, we try to be ultra-smart and address all potential corner cases including those that so rarely that we could safely ignore them with minimal impact to our business. Instead of trying to boil the ocean we should design networks that are stable and easy to troubleshoot while optimizing and reducing complexity across the whole IT infrastructure.
This webinar will put you in the right mindset and help you refocus on what really matters: the business needs of your organization.
Contents
Three paths of Enterprise IT: We keep hearing about disaggregated infrastructure, whitebox switching, virtual network functions, Google-Infrastructure-for-Everyone-Else (GIFEE), hybrid clouds… and the more we try to figure out where these ideas might be relevant in our infrastructure, the more confused we get.
It’s time to realize that not all IT environments are equal. Apart from the traditional Service Provider/Enterprise split, we’re approaching another major junction where enterprise IT teams will have to decide whether they want to use their infrastructure as a strategic asset or get rid of it and move to the cloud.
Address the Business Challenges First: Numerous organizations try to enter new markets like public cloud services without ever figuring out whether they can reach the potential customers, have the sales and marketing expertise to connect with the customers, and have the technical skills to deliver the services.
This part of the webinar is based on hard lessons Ivan learned from failed real-life private or public cloud deployments, and will tell you why it's important to focus of business aspects of networking solutions before rushing into technology decisions.
Managing Technical Debt: Every time we make an exception in IT infrastructure, we’re creating technical debt. As most temporary fixes become permanent, the accumulating technical debt never decreases leading to a point where it’s almost impossible to improve the infrastructure because it became too complex and too hard to manage.
Real-Life Disaster Recovery: This short case study describes the results of an analysis triggered by a multi-data-center meltdown caused by stretched VLANs. Not surprisingly, stretched VLANs recommended by vendor consultants were not needed, could not be used as envisioned, and significantly contributed to infrastructure instability.
Happy Campers
About the webinar
- Lots of material to make you smile, if you are a GONER
- Richard Seepaul
- I would tell them that going to the Executive Briefing Center for the "free" lunch will end with either a pitch for a vacation time share or the promotion of the latest whizbang fix-all-yer problems switch protocol. The notion of technology debt seems particularly useful and falls right in line with DNS flag day earlier this year.
- Jim Warner
- Excellent reference to get an impartial view of the technology
- Antonio Boj
- You will NEVER see this kind of material on traditional training since it is usually hidden from Engineers.
This is a great asset to understand and improve how to take technical decisions from a business perspective. That will change how your peers and managers perceive you.
It is a great compilation based on real field experience of the non-technical aspects of networking but focused on the business it supports, which is, in turn, the main reason for the network to exist. - adrian giacometti
- ipspace.net stuff is the best anywhere.
- Scott Kingsley
About the materials
- thanks
- Jim Warner
- Looking forward to go to Slovenia someday ;)
- adrian giacometti
Other feedback from the attendees
- I thought it was a good step back from the normal technical discussions. Sometimes it is easy to dive quickly into the technical side (and vendor spin). This talks about basic fundamentals we should be considering when building enterprise networks.
- Network architect, educational institution
- This session was brilliant and just as useful or more, than the technical sessions. Would love more of the same from time to time.
- Network architect, large enterprise
About the Author
Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354 Emeritus, is an independent network architect, book author, blogger and regular speaker at industry events like Interop, RIPE and regional NOG meetings. He has been designing and implementing large-scale service provider and enterprise networks since 1990, and is currently using his expertise to help multinational enterprises and large cloud- and service providers design next-generation data center and cloud infrastructure using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) approaches and technologies.
Ivan is the author of several books covering data center technologies, highly praised webinars, and dozens of data center and cloud-related technical articles published on his blog.