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Well, the blog has been languishing for a while, as I’ve been extraordinarily busy with a new EVP, a round of layoffs, and many personal distractions.  Here’s a little Netstalgia piece, not really technical, for your enjoyment.

I’ve told a few stories about my years at the Cisco Gold Partner, where I did both pre- and post-sales roles.  The Cisco practice in the San Francisco office was new, so being the only Cisco guy required wearing a lot of hats.  That said, one day I wore a hat I didn’t expect or want.

At the end of every week I’d look at our calendar to figure out my schedule for the next week.  It was maintained by a project coordinator.  Some appointments I had put on the calendar myself, others were requested by account managers or customers directly.  One day as I looked at my calendar, I saw the following week booked.  “City of San Mateo,” it said.  I had no experience with this customer, so I called our project coordinator to figure out what the mystery job was.

“You’ll be placing phones,” she said.

“Placing them?” I asked, confused.  She told me we had sold a VOIP deal with San Mateo to replace all of their PBX-phones with Cisco IP phones.  The entire San Francisco office had been roped in to physically placing the phones on desks across the city.  Even our Citrix guy was going to be there.

I called my VP of services and complained.  “I have two CCIEs and you want me to run around for a week plugging in phones?”

“Just be glad you have billable hours,” he said.  Were we really that desperate?

It turns out, yes.  Myself, the office Citrix guy, and one or two other folks met in San Mateo city hall and divided up box after box of IP phones.  We had to do city hall and library, which were the easiest.  Then I ended up doing the police headquarters.  I remember putting phones on all the desks in the detective room, with concerned police officers looking on as I rooted around on my hands and knees for data jacks under their desks.  I had to move weapons (non-lethal), ballistic vests, and other police gear to find the ports.

I also had to do the fire department.  For a small city, San Mateo has a lot of fire stations.  It wasn’t always easy to park.  The first one I pulled up to in my BMW, loaded with phones, had no parking anywhere.  I found a notepad and a pencil in my car, scrawled out “OFFICIAL BUSINESS” on a sheet of lined paper, stuck it in my window, and parked on the sidewalk.  I used my pass at several fire stations, earning quizzical looks from firemen when I parked myself on the sidewalk in front of their station.

I learned an important lesson in leadership from this event.  If the VP had called a meeting the week before, he could have said the following:  “Look team, I know you’re all highly skilled and don’t want to do manual labor.  But we have a big deal here, it’s important to the company, and it’s all hands on deck.  I’ll be there myself with you placing phones.  Let’s get this done and I’ll buy you all a nice dinner at the end of the week.”  Had he said something like this, I think we would have rallied around him.  Instead, he just surreptitiously had it added to the calendar and copped an attitude when challenged.  He actually wasn’t a bad guy, but he missed on this one.

Anyways, plugging in phones is the closest I became to being a VOIP guy.

There is one really nice thing about having a blog whose readership consists mainly of car insurance spambots:  I don’t have to feel guilty when I don’t post anything for a while.  I had started a series on programmability, but I managed to get sidetracked by the inevitable runup to Cisco Live that consumes Cisco TME’s, and so that thread got a bit neglected.

Meanwhile, an old article by the great Ivan Pepelnjak got me out of post-CL recuperation and back onto the blog.  Ivan’s article talks about how vendor lock-in is inevitable.  Thank you, Ivan.  Allow me to go further, and write a paean in praise of vendor lock-in.  Now this might seem predicable given that I work at Cisco, and previously worked at Juniper.  Of course, lock-in is very good for the vendor who gets the lock.  However, I also spent many years in IT, and also worked at a partner, and I can say from experience that I prefer to manage single vendor networks.  At least, as single vendor as is possible in a modern network.  Two stories will help to illustrate this.

In my first full-fledged network engineer job, I managed the network for a large metropolitan newspaper (back when such a thing existed.)  The previous network team had installed a bunch of Foundry gear.  They also had a fair amount of Cisco.  It was all first generation, and the network was totally unstable.  Foundry actually had some decent hardware, but their early focus was IP.  We were running a typical 1990’s multi-protocol network, with AppleTalk, IPX, SNA, and a few other things thrown in.  The AppleTalk/IPX stack on the Foundry was particularly bad, and when it interacted with Cisco devices we had a real mess.

We ended up tossing the Foundry and going 100% Cisco.  We managed to stabilize the network, and now we were dealing with a single vendor instead of two.  This made support and maintenance contract management far easier.

Second story:  When I worked for the partner, I had to do a complete retrofit of the network for a small school district.  They had a ton of old HP, and were upgrading their PBX to a Cisco VoIP solution.  This was in the late 2000’s.  I did the data network, and my partner did the voice setup.  The customer didn’t have enough money to replace all their switches, so a couple of classrooms were left with HP.

Well, guess what.  In all the Cisco-based rooms, I plugged in the phones and they came up fine.  The computers hanging off the internal phone switch port also came up fine, on the correct data VLAN.  But on the classrooms with the HP switches, I spent hours trying to get the phones and switches working together.

There is a point here which is obvious, but needs restating.  If Cisco makes the switches, the routers, the firewalls, and the phones, the chances of them all working together is much higher than if several vendors are in the mix.  Even with Cisco’s internal BU structure, it is far easier to call a meeting with different departments within a company than to fix problems that occur between vendors.  Working on Software Defined-Access, I learned very quickly how well we can pull together a team from different product groups, since our product involves switching (my BU), ISE, wireless, and APIC-EM.

As I mentioned above, the other advantage is easier management of the non-technical side of things.  Managing support contracts, and simply having one throat to choke when things go wrong are big advantages of a single-vendor environment.

All this being said, from a programmability perspective we are committed to open standards.  We realize that many customers want a multi-vendor environment and tools like OpenConfig with which to manage it.  Despite Cisco’s reputation, we’re here to make our customers happy and not force them into anything.  From my point of view, however, if I ever go back to managing a network I hope it is a single-vendor network and not a Fraken-network.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to hear my podcast with Ivan, click here.

In this article in my “10 Years a CCIE” series, I take you inside the infamous CCIE lab, where countless candidates have sweated out the devious challenges concocted by the CCIE exam authors.

Planning travel

I was fortunate at the time I took the lab exam in that I lived in San Francisco, very close to the San Jose test site. However, knowing the unpredictability of Bay Area traffic, and also knowing that the exam was very early in the morning (I am not a morning person) I decided it would be best to book a hotel room close to the test site. I even went so far as the book 2 nights in a hotel room, figuring that on the morning of the exam I wouldn’t want to deal with checking out of the hotel. This was perhaps excessive, but it made me relax and even for the well-prepared candidate your mental state is important.

The hotel on Great America Parkway where I stayed

The hotel on Great America parkway where I stayed

I often see test advice which says to get a good rest, to eat well, to not drink alcohol, etc., before your exam. Frankly, I always feel insulted when I see this advice. Of course I’m not going to get drunk the night before the exam. I don’t think anybody needs someone to tell them this. However, I do recommend planning your travel arrangements carefully to reduce stress on the day of the exam. I even drove the straight shot down Tasman the night before to check out the building where the exam was, just so that I would know my way. Read More »