The Purpose Of This Blog

Since this is the first posting, I figured I would just take a brief moment and explain my purpose here.

I've been directly involved in the networking arena for almost fifteen years now, starting with small business networking as a part time job while attending North Carolina State University. I quickly picked up on the fact that Cisco would end up leading the world of networking for many years to come so I started learning as much as I could about Cisco while working for Sprint. I was fortunate enough to come to Sprint's internal Network Engineering group as they migrated from an Olicom bridged network to a fully routed Cisco network back in the 1990s. Training and certifications followed and the rest is history.

Although I am thankful to Cisco's technology for being a catalyst of my career, I am much more open to best of breed products from many different networking technology vendors including Juniper, Check Point and F5 to name a few. I am committed to evaluating products and technologies based upon their true technological and business value and not just because one vendor says their product is superior to the other. Hopefully you will find this to be true.

Since I have focused my entire career in the networking arena, I feel that I have now gained enough experience with the technologies to offer some value into what is truly relevant to today's enterprise environment. Technology, after all, is only relevant to business if it can solve business challenges.

With that said, I see a major change coming in the networking world and it centers around virtualization. Network Engineers have been virtualizing for years (think VLANs). However, everything is moving towards a more virtualized state as we move closer to cloud computing type models. I saw the first wave of this new focus at Cisco's Networker's conference this year. Almost all of the sessions I attended revolved around virtualization of some sort and it seemed many of the first adopters of the new technologies were going to be the data center & service provider markets. Hence, I made a recent job change and went to work for one such organization so that I would have the opportunity to be at the forefront of this shift.

Hopefully others may learn a tiny bit from this blog but if it serves no other purpose than to document my own learning experiences as we move forward, it will be worth it.