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| by dpocoroba on July 7th, 2010 | tags: Cisco, CiscoLive, Las Vegas |
I have finally returned from wonderful (and very hot Las Vegas, NV) where Cisco Live 2010 was held at the Mandalay Bay casino.
This was my second Networkers or “Cisco Live” as it’s now known. Overall this event was a blast!!
Summary of the weeks events:
1) Four full days of classes
2) One free Cisco test, I chose to take the CCDE written, 350-002
3) Keynote from John Chambers
4) Customer appreciation event/ CCIE appreciation event
5) “World of Solutions” expo where all the vendors show off their latest and greatest toys/software
6) Plenty of alcohol to keep the party going 
The event this year was quite a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the classes I took and was happy with how the event was run. Some key things I thought were excellent was the use of a mobile website. From this site it was easy to track what was going on during the week. Your class schedule and room locations. When lunch was being served and when the expo opened. From this website you could also easily perform class surveys and forms as well as drop/add classes with just a few clicks. This was much easier then having to do everything from your PC when you just wanted to confirm room numbers, etc.
The class material was all put on a 2GB “Cisco Live” USB key which I thought was cool. I had already went ahead and pulled down the PDF’s from the Cisco live website, but this was already in an easy to use HTML type content so you could easily search for classes by day, name, number, etc.
There was PLENTY of wireless coverage for the 12,500 people in attendance this year. There were these tripod type devices all over with 1 or 2 AP’s attached throughout the conference. I was told there were approx 300+ AP’s in use. I saw on the WCS stats over 3000+ wireless clients connected. Cisco was pushing their new “Clean Air” Technology, which was very very slick!!
Some pics of WCS at the NOC and the AP’s:
The classes themselves were good, excellent content and great speakers on the content. One of the most interesting was a class on Cisco’s security penetration team. Very entertaining stories. They also got the award for using the words “pwned” and “owned” the most in any of the classes I took 
All of the classes were recorded and will be placed online for people who attended the event. This will allow you to go back and watch for a year. This is great feature since there were classes I could not take due to scheduling conflicts.
The testing center was nice and clean. helpful staff that you would find at any other VUE testing location. Unfortunately I did not pass the CCDE written test, ah well next time I don’t feel so bad since it did not cost me $350 to take the exam.
The keynote was also nicely done, Even though this was my second Cisco Live event it was my first time seeing John Chambers talk. Lots of good info and direction Cisco is headed. There was over 12,000 people at the conference and another 11,000 virtually. The demo and announcement of the Cius had everyone attention. The demo itself went well there was some lag in the VoIP call but the video feed was solid
I actually did not attend the regular customer appreciation event held at the MGM. I did however make it to the CCIE appreciation event held at the voodoo lounge at the Rio. We were all shipped by several buses to the club where the entire place was reserved for a bunch of Cisco nerds There was lots of great food and alcohol to keep the party going. Even though most people seemed to end up talking tech the conversations were great and met a lot of interesting people. One of those people was actually Joe Pinto, Senior VP. There was some ice sculptures with the CCIE and Cisco Live logos.
The world of solution is where some big named vendors showed off their products and gave out plenty of swag. There was a Cisco store that was selling all kinds of Cisco gear. T-shirts, books, hats, bags, pens, notebooks, etc, etc
One of the more interesting approaches I saw to get people into one booth was to have UFC legend Randy Couture! Very nice guy, he was also giving out signed pics.
And yes!! that is the Networking-forum.com T-Shirt!!
Other people I ran into during this event was CCIE legend and CCDE, Scott Morris. He was a very nice guy and had a quick chat with him.
There was also PLENTY! of Cisco hardware there on display. Everything from the new 3750X series to the big Nexus series switches. I got some good pics on the album for everyone to check out.
Overall this event was a great deal of fun. Was good to talk to Cisco about new products and where they are headed for some technology. One of the things I was happy to hear from a Cisco engineer is a soon to be new 6513-E chassis soon and sometime later a new 2TB sup card. This will FINALLY address the single/dual fabric slots and bring the whole chassis up to spec to support all slots with dual fabric line cards, bout dang time
Hopefully I will get to go back again next year.
Link to all my pics that were taken for the event.
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