I attended a Cisco event yesterday titled “Cisco Tech Days.” It was an all-day seminar by Cisco SEs on two areas of technology:
Advanced Campus Topics
Branch-WAN Topics
It was a good day of presentations (I stuck with the Advanced Campus track). The presenters are regional SEs, which means that some of the presentations are not as polished as if they were given by the corporate marketing folks. Having the local SEs do the presentations gives you an idea of who knows what in your area and often means that they are skipping a lot of the corporate marketing stuff in favor of the technical content (that’s a good thing in my mind). A couple of the presenters in the Advanced Campus track were very good and a couple were so-so. But even in the so-so presentations, the slides included good content that was useful to me.
One of the presentations was on High Availability design, which I’ve seen at past Networkers. It is good to see it again, which helps me pick up on more nuances that I missed in prior viewings. This is an excellent topic since it covers excellent tips on network design as well as improving network availability. Ask your Cisco rep to get you a copy if you don’t have access to the copy from the Networkers site.
The sessions started at 830am and ended at 5pm, when everyone’s brain was full. A continental break fast and lunch were provided. Even better, it was all free. There are sessions still pending at some cities across the country. I tried to find the schedule and registration link on Cisco’s web site, but had to resort to loading the announcement on our site: tech_days-v2_TD-com-ev1a.pdf. I received the announcement in an email blast to the region from our local Cisco office, so I presume that it is acceptable to make it public.