Alan Sutter's Technology Blog

Educause 2011 - InCommon becomes more common

2011-11-04T14:08:00.002-04:00

InCommon is a federated identity consortium. It sets up the trust that is needed for information providers (like JStore) to authenticate the students and employees at colleges and universities trying to use their services. At F&M, when someone tries to access information on a server that is located here, we use LDAP to authenticate them so that the server can decide if they are authorized to access that information. When that information is not at F&M, authentication becomes much more difficult, which is where Shibboleth and InCommon come in. They provide the bridge between the information provider and the information consumer. We are in the final stages of getting setting up this bridge at F&M.

I noticed a lot more buzz about InCommon at the conference. The reason for this is a shift in emphasis. When I went to Interop in May, the talk was about what needed to be done IF you moved to the cloud. At Educause, it was a discussion about WHEN you moved to the cloud.

The Internet2 organization seems to understand this. They have started a new initiative called Net+ which is all about providing services, and not about the network itself. They are busy brokering deals with SaaS vendors to make it easy for members of Internet2 to use these services. The model is that Internet2 contracts with the vendor and then the colleges and universities that want that service are billed by Internet2.

InCommon fits into this model and in some ways is the keystone that makes it work. In order the colleges and universities to be able to work with information providers, they need to have a mechanism for authentication. So as Internet2 is working with the vendors, they are getting them hooked up to Internet2 and getting them into InCommon.

With Internet2 pushing InCommon and more and more vendors coming on board, I expect mentions of InCommon to become more common.

Philly cityscape at sunset

2011-10-20T18:08:00.001-04:00

Google reception at the Academy of Natural Science

2011-10-19T19:51:00.001-04:00

T-Rex at the Academy of Natural Sciences

Mobile computing

2011-10-19T09:46:00.001-04:00

The answer is a)

Educause bound

2011-10-17T16:56:00.000-04:00

I am heading out tomorrow for the Educause conference in Philadelphia. I am looking forward to picking up information in lot of different areas. The area that tops the list is Google Apps for Education and it looks like there will be lots of opportunities to gather information and talk to people who are ahead of us in implementing it.

Final list of vendors and sessions attended at Interop

2011-05-18T13:39:00.001-04:00

Here's the final list that was emailed to me of exhibitors who scanned my badge and sessions that I attended. I know I visited way more than 43 booths, so I'm not sure what happened. The session list seems fairly accurate. Feel free to ask me about anything you see that peeks your interest.

Exhibitor Booth Scans:	43
Sessions Attended:	19

Exhibitor Booth Scans

Scan Date	Exhibiting Company	URL
5/9/2011 10:17 AM	NaviSite, Inc.	www.navisite.com
5/10/2011 11:24 AM	Safari Books Online	www.safaribooksonline.com
5/10/2011 11:37 AM	FireHost, Inc	www.firehost.com
5/10/2011 11:48 AM	Citrix Systems	www.citrix.com
5/10/2011 12:09 PM	ManageEngine (Zoho Corporation)	www.manageengine.com
5/10/2011 12:16 PM	Spirent Communications	www.spirent.com
5/10/2011 12:21 PM	New Horizons Computer Learning Centers	newhorizons.com
5/10/2011 12:24 PM	WildPackets, Inc.	wildpackets.com
5/10/2011 12:29 PM	Alcatel-Lucent (c/o MC²)	www.alcatel-lucent.com/wps/portal?COUNTRY_CODE=US&COOKIE_SET=false
5/10/2011 12:38 PM	NetSupport Inc.	netsupport-inc.com
5/10/2011 12:39 PM	CXtec	www.cxtec.com
5/10/2011 12:48 PM	Diskeeper Corporation	diskeeper.com
5/10/2011 12:49 PM	APCON	www.apcon.com
5/10/2011 12:55 PM	Symmetricom	symmetricom.com
5/10/2011 12:58 PM	OFC/NFOEC	www.ofcnfoec.org
5/10/2011 1:01 PM	Smith Micro Software Inc	smithmicro.com
5/10/2011 1:06 PM	DisplayLink Corp	displaylink.com
5/10/2011 4:40 PM	Eaton Corporation	eaton.com/powerquality
5/10/2011 6:31 PM	Rackspace Hosting	www.rackspace.com
5/11/2011 12:45 PM	VeriSign	www.verisigninc.com
5/11/2011 12:46 PM	Brocade	www.brocade.com
5/11/2011 12:48 PM	Gigamon	www.gigamon.com
5/11/2011 1:01 PM	Axis Communications	www.axis.com/
5/11/2011 1:25 PM	Symplified	www.symplified.com
5/11/2011 1:34 PM	Transition Networks	www.transition.com
5/11/2011 1:39 PM	Blue Coat Systems, Inc.	www.bluecoat.com/
5/11/2011 1:42 PM	Securence	www.securence.com/
5/11/2011 1:51 PM	Honeywell Batteries	honeywellbatteries.com
5/11/2011 2:06 PM	Network Hardware Resale	www.networkhardware.com/
5/11/2011 2:10 PM	Riverbed	www.riverbed.com
5/11/2011 4:17 PM	Barracuda Networks	www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en
5/11/2011 4:20 PM	VMware	www.vmware.com
5/11/2011 4:39 PM	ESRI	www.esri.com
5/12/2011 12:44 PM	Arista Networks	www.aristanetworks.com
5/12/2011 12:47 PM	F5 Networks	www.f5.com
5/12/2011 12:57 PM	Namescape	www.namescape.com
5/12/2011 1:49 PM	Tripwire, Inc.	tripwire.com
5/12/2011 1:51 PM	Hosting.com	www.hosting.com
5/12/2011 2:12 PM	EMC	emc.com
5/12/2011 2:14 PM	Electric Cloud	electric-cloud.com
5/12/2011 2:40 PM	Extreme Networks, Inc	www.extremenetworks.com
5/12/2011 2:48 PM	APC	apc.com
5/12/2011 2:49 PM	Xirrus	xirrus.com

Sessions/Activity Scans

Session Date	Activity Name	Recordings URL
5/8/2011 8:30 AM	Enterprise Cloud Summit - Public Clouds	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/workshops-tripreport.php
5/9/2011 8:30 AM	Enterprise Cloud Summit - Private Clouds	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/workshops-tripreport.php
5/10/2011 8:00 AM	Tuesday Morning Keynotes	interop.com/lv/2011/free
5/10/2011 10:00 AM	T-Shirt Giveaway
5/10/2011 10:15 AM	The Big Questions: Wireless/Mobile Analyst Roundtable	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/10/2011 11:30 AM	What is the Impact of Cloud Computing on the Network?	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/10/2011 1:00 PM	Tuesday Afternoon Keynotes	interop.com/lv/2011/free
5/10/2011 2:15 PM	Mac, iPhone & iPad: New Threats in The Traditional Enterprise	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/10/2011 3:30 PM	Breakthrough LAN Technologies	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/11/2011 8:30 AM	Wednesday Morning Keynotes	interop.com/lv/2011/free
5/11/2011 10:15 AM	Cloud Storage: DR for Free - Everything in Parallel	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/11/2011 11:30 AM	Best Practices for Desktop and Application Virtualization	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/11/2011 2:00 PM	Making Sense of Multi-Path Ethernet Networks	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/11/2011 3:15 PM	The Real Next Generation Network	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/12/2011 9:00 AM	Virtualization + Management & Automation = Private Cloud?	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/12/2011 9:00 AM	Making the Case for Storage Virtualization	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/12/2011 10:15 AM	Best Practices: The Road From Server Virtualization/Consolidation to Private Cloud	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/12/2011 11:30 AM	Building VMware Private Clouds	www.interop.com/lasvegas/2011/presentations/conference-tripreport.php
5/12/2011 1:00 PM	NOC Tour - Thu 1pm

Netflix Passes Piracy in U.S. Net Traffic

2011-05-18T09:31:00.002-04:00

An interesting blog describing how Netflix traffic in now larger than peer to peer.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/netflix-traffic/

Both sides of a cloud

2011-05-16T16:45:00.003-04:00

I saw this cartoon today and couldn't resist posting it, given all the posting I did about clouds last week.

iPad wrap-up

2011-05-15T23:50:00.001-04:00

I thought I should do a wrap-up post on how the iPad worked for the trip. To be brief, I would say it worked very well. I would not hesitate in taking one again. The combination of the iPad and the Bluetooth keyboard worked very well, especially when there was a table.

The battery life of the iPad was great and I never had to change the batteries in the keyboard. The lightness of my bag was also wonderful, especially at the end of the day. In short, all of the advantages I hoped for before I left were borne out.

The iPad was wonderful on the plane flights, which is something I hadn't though of. It worked well for blogging. The slides posted to my blog were done by downloading the presentation slides on the iPad, taking a screen shot of the one I wanted and then posting the resulting jpeg by sending it to a secret email address. The photos, by the way, all came from my iPhone and were posted using the same secret email address.

I'm having a hard time thinking of any time I wished I had a laptop. I had to think about different ways to do some things and I did download a couple of apps to do some things that I hadn't thought about ahead of time. My typing skills with the virtual keyboard did improve as there were many times that the bluetooth keyboard was not convenient. This post is being done with just the virtual keyboard.

Having the 3G iPad was important. There were a number of times when I didn't have wi-fi and even more times when the wi-fi was either very slow or not working at all. When that happened, I simply turned off the wi-fi an kept going. That said, I will say that having a wireless access point in my hotel room worked out nicely.

All in all, it was a great experience!

The benefits of attending a conference

2011-05-15T22:57:00.000-04:00

It would be easy to say that conferences are not as useful as they once were, given the huge amount of information that is available on the web. All the web sites, online documents, webinars, etc. do provide a lot of useful information.

There is a difference though. That has become painfully obvious to me in attending Interop this week. I have so much in this past week, and it's information I wish I had known before I made some of the decisions that I have made over the last year or so.

Why is going to a conference so different? Let me tell you.

Face-to-face interaction with other attendees can be priceless. Just talking with other people while sitting around the lunch table to find out what they have tried and whether it worked or not. Finding out what they thought about a presentation. It's instant feedback on the worth of the information that is being presented to me. I don't get that with a webpage or a webinar.

Having time with no distractions to let complex topics percolate in your head is important. The complexity of IT is increasing at an exponential rate, so this time become even more important. Sitting in on 3 sessions listening to 10 or more presenters talk about the same basic topic from different perspectives leads to the "ah ha" moments to get a more fundamental understanding of a topic.

The other side of the coin is hearing presentations on a bunch of different topics and seeing how they work together together to create a paradigm shift in the industry. The biggest example from this conference was cloud computing and mobile computing. The two together create a whole new world in which it is quite conceivable that neither the client or the server are on your network. So what good does a firewall do you in that case?

Seeing and hearing someone speak provides a lot of subliminal information about a topic. Inflection and body language convey a lot of extra information that helps you understand how the person you are listening to feels about the information they are conveying to you. Do they really believe what they are saying, or is it just marketing? Does this person really know what they are talking about? Questions that are much easier to answer if you can see and hear them and interact with them.

As I said in the first paragraph, there is a lot of information available on the Internet. The problem is that it is too much information and there is very little filtering of the information that is out there. At a conference, there is a filtering process that provides sessions that someone who is expert in the area feel are worthwhile and are presented by experts in the field.

So here I am more than 3 days after the conference is over, and I'm still processing all the information that I was exposed to during the conference. It's information that will effect the planning and decisions I will make for years to come. Decisions that will involve spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours. Spending a few thousand going to a conference to help make sure that those decisions are good ones seems like a pretty good idea to me.

Getting our heads out of the sand and into the clouds

2011-05-15T22:29:00.001-04:00

One of the underlying themes I've been sensing is that we have been spending way too much time on keeping existing systems going and not nearly enough time on looking to the future. It's the 80/20 rule that one of my blog posts talked about. I feel like, in some ways, we've had our heads in the sand for the last few years. We make changes to our infrastructure, but we don't spend a lot of time talking and planning for how the changes we make will effect our clients and what their needs are and will be.

At this conference, it's all about mobile devices and services in the cloud. We really need to take a hard look at our network design keeping in mind that both our clients and our services won't be on our physical network a lot of the time. I keep hearing terms like "fundamental shift in the industry" being thrown around. I know there is a lot of hype about this, but there are early adopters who are already there.

The cloud is more than just technology. It's about a change in the mindset for what we provide to our clients. It's about about providing services instead of hardware and software.

I see this in the frustration even other groups inside of IT express in trying to make their projects a reality. It's about being more agile. Several presenters talked about how corporate IT didn't even know how much other departments were just going out and using the software as a service offerings as islands, because they didn't want to wait for IT. Then IT is blind-sided when there is data stolen or something stops working and they didn't know anything about it. That's the challenge. How does IT provide solutions that are up to the standards needed by the corporation, but in a timely fashion.

We need to lead the charge, or we'll get run over by our clients.

Thursday notes

2011-05-15T22:13:00.001-04:00

Sorry the last few notes have been so dry. I wanted to get the notes out there as quickly as possible. Thursday morning I went to 3 sessions in a row on moving from virtualization to private clouds. The afternoon was spent in the exhibit hall.

The sessions I went to helped me finally really understand the difference between virtualization and a private cloud. A private cloud is virtualization with good management tools sitting on top of it. In a lot of ways it's more a change in business practices than in a difference in technology. The provide cloud provides a catalog of standardized VMs and storage options that can be deployed very quickly. The business side of this comes in the standardization of the images and the life cycle management of those images. It's the automatic updating of those images and the agility this provides to the company. You want a LAMP server, boom, here you go.

Here is the progression from virtualization to private clouds:

Server virtualization and consolidation
Infrastructure optimization -- both storage and network
Management and automation
IT as a service ==> private cloud

There are a lot of tools out there from many different vendors. They are getting better over time. The tools are also becoming cross-platform, meaning that one tool can be used to manage private clouds and public clouds from multiple vendors. Many of these tools deal with the concept of a Service Catalog. This is basically a menu of VMs, storage and networking choices. They are standardized for fast deployment and easier management. As part of the life-cycle management a good CMDB tool is needed. This will help reduce VM sprawl.

There was some discussion of the latest version of VMware and some of the tools that are available with it. This version has some significant improvements in iSCSI performance. It was also stated that moving to using the VMware backup client instead of individual backup clients on each VM can make a huge difference in backups. If you are backing up the entire VMFS volume at once, the backup software can do a lot more de-duping.

Applications need to become cloud aware. How many apps have IP address built into them or their configuration files. What does F&M need to do to make this happen. Zimbra is a terrible example of this.

It was suggested that we should put a price tag on the services we provide, even if we don't actually collect money. It will help our clients realize the cost of what they are asking for.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and BYO3

2011-05-15T21:33:00.000-04:00

I went to a few sessions in a row that all dealt with VDI and the influx of multiple devices per person. There are lots of things to think about if you are looking at moving to VDI. In a nutshell, VDI is creating a VM for employees to use as their desktop system or for them to use to get to company applications. We've been doing the latter for years and have been experimenting with virtual desktops recently. Most companies can categorize the employees in to several groups based on their computing needs, what resources they need to get to, and whether they are always in the office or not.

There is no longer a 1 to 1 relationship between clients and machines. Clients want to access their apps from multiple devices and multiple locations. Virtualizing apps makes the data more secure, because it is not stored on the mobile devices. This is a fundamental shift. The combination of the cloud and mobile means that everything is migrating away from your corporate network. The network needs to be re-designed to deal with this fact.

One speaker said that he foresees a time when IT wil be getting out the business of providing client machines. Employees are starting to bring their own machines into work. Think of the iPhone and any other mobile device. Think of the personally owned laptop or desktop at home. With budget crunches, some companies are expecting their employees to provide their own laptop. This is BYOC or Bring Your Own Computer. BYO3 is everyone bringing 3 or more devices to work.

Using the cloud for backup and DR

2011-05-15T21:19:00.000-04:00

There are several companies that do hybrid cloud storage. By this I mean they have a device that is onsite at the customer's data center which contains some storage and caches the storage that is out in the cloud. Most of these vendors support the use of many different cloud storage vendors like Amazon. The theory is that a lot of your data is not access on a regular basis, so it doesn't need to reside locally. The local box looks like an iSCSI or FibreChannel drive to your systems.

The cloud is just a tool. You still need to use best practices to keep your data safe. You can use multiple clouds to replicate your data or use the cloud to keep a copy of the data you have in your data center. Using the cloud can be more expensive, but it can be more available to you in a disaster. Using one of these devices for backup can also free up time since you don't need to manage a tape library.

Data should be encrypted and the key should be stored on a local system and not leave the client site. This is requirement for regulatory compliance.

I've said this before, but it was mentioned many, many times. It's important to design your apps assuming there will be failures, because there will be. Distributing and replicating data and services makes an app more reliable.

Catching up - Wednesday Keynotes

2011-05-15T21:09:00.000-04:00

It's Sunday night, and I am finally getting around to catching up on what I saw at the conference.
The keynotes on Wednesday morning were good. As a group, they were the best set of the three keynote sessions.

It started off with a nice panel discussion on public cloud issues. The panelists were all from companies that provide public cloud services. They talked about how the industry is still in it's infancy. The likened public clouds to other new IT ideas. At first there are not a lot standards on how things are done, but over time the industry settles down and it is lot easier to move from one vendor to another. There was some discussion of the Amazon outage. Those who wrote their apps with the cloud in mind did much better than those that didn't.

Intel did a presentation that emphasized how quickly they are pushing the processing power of cpu chips which is allowing things to be done with computers that could not be done before. They also talked a lot about what they are doing to save energy. 85% of the power they use in their own facilities comes from wind or solar power! Pretty impressive. Here's a couple of facts they threw out:

150 Exabytes of data were sent through the Internet from it's beginnings in the 1970s through the end of 2009. In 2010 alone, 245 Exabytes of data was sent! Exponential growth.
Data Centers in the United States consume 2% of the total electricity used.

Avaya did a nice presentation on what can be done with unified communications. It sort of reminded me of the Apple Knowledge Navigator piece from years ago, but they were demoing stuff that is available from them today. Pretty impressive. They even have an iPad client for their unified communications system.

Smoke

2011-05-14T22:00:00.000-04:00

I just finished washing the clothes I packed for my trip to Las Vegas. Not just what I wore, but everything I took. I had to because everything I took smelled of stale smoke. There was the smell of smoke everywhere in the building. My room was a non-smoking room, but even there you could still smell the smoke. I hated to turn the light on in the bathroom because the fan would come on too. This would draw air in from the hallway under my door which would increase the smell in my room.

Clothes that went directly from my suitcase to a drawer in the dresser and then to a plastic bag before going back in my bag smelled of smoke. I couldn't believe it.

Maybe I'm more sensitive to it since I rarely encounter it anymore. It still bothers me. What is it about casinos that engenders so much smoking? Is there such a thing as a smoke-free casino? I'd like to know.

Blogger problems

2011-05-13T20:23:00.002-04:00

Well, the best laid plans and all that. As I said in my last post, I was going to take the down time I had between the end of the conference at 3 p.m. and my flight leaving at Midnight to bring my blog up-to-date with what I had learned the last couple of days. Unfortunately, Blogger had problems, which took it off line for almost 24 hours. Here's the link to their official statement:

http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/05/blogger-is-back.html

So now that it's back and I'm back home, I'll redo a few of my posts from Thursday morning that were lost and start working on my backlog. Wish me luck.

Long Days

2011-05-12T11:50:00.001-04:00

The days at this conference have been long. Between attending sessions and spending time on the show floor, it's been hard to find time to write posts during the day. I meant to write last night, but crashed in my room for a while after the conference ended for the day. Went to a vendor-sponsored reception for dinner at the top of THE Hotel for an hour or so and then came back to the room and went to bed. I think I was asleep withing a minute after I turned the light out.

The conference ends at 3 p.m. today and I have about 9 hours until my red-eye flight leaves, so I should have a chance to catch up on blogging what I learned. Until then...

Virtualization Phases

2011-05-12T09:30:00.001-04:00

The Las Vegas strip at night

2011-05-11T23:04:00.000-04:00

View from the top of THE Hotel

2011-05-11T22:19:00.000-04:00

Network Evolution

2011-05-11T18:22:00.000-04:00

This is a nice summary of where networking is going.

Interesting numbers

2011-05-11T12:37:00.001-04:00

Exhibit hall - Tuesday

2011-05-11T01:07:00.000-04:00

The ID badges for attendees this year are the size of credit cards and contain an RFID chip in them. Whenever I enter a confernce session or talk to a vendor in the exhibit hall, they hold a device that look very much like an old-style cell phone up to my badge and it reads the RFID info off of it. At the conference sessions, the device actually speaks saying "allowed" if I pass muster. Haven't heard what it says if someone who hasn't paid for the conference sessions tries to sneak in to a session. Makes me think of the old sci-fi movie, Logan's Run.

At then end of the day today, I got an email which detailed exactly which sessions I attended and which vendor booths I visited. According to the email I spent time with 25 vendors today. Only 325 more to go :-)

Exhibitor Booth Scans
Scan Date Exhibiting Company URL
5/9/2011 10:17 AM NaviSite, Inc. www.navisite.com
5/10/2011 11:07 AM Xirrus xirrus.com
5/10/2011 11:07 AM VMware www.vmware.com
5/10/2011 11:24 AM Safari Books Online www.safaribooksonline.com
5/10/2011 11:34 AM Tripwire, Inc. tripwire.com
5/10/2011 11:37 AM FireHost, Inc www.firehost.com
5/10/2011 11:48 AM Citrix Systems www.citrix.com
5/10/2011 12:09 PM ManageEngine (Zoho Corporation) www.manageengine.com
5/10/2011 12:16 PM Spirent Communications www.spirent.com
5/10/2011 12:19 PM EMC emc.com
5/10/2011 12:21 PM New Horizons Computer Learning Centers newhorizons.com
5/10/2011 12:24 PM WildPackets, Inc. wildpackets.com
5/10/2011 12:29 PM Alcatel-Lucent (c/o MC²) www.alcatel-lucent.com/
5/10/2011 12:38 PM NetSupport Inc. netsupport-inc.com
5/10/2011 12:39 PM CXtec www.cxtec.com
5/10/2011 12:48 PM Diskeeper Corporation diskeeper.com
5/10/2011 12:49 PM APCON www.apcon.com
5/10/2011 12:55 PM Symmetricom symmetricom.com
5/10/2011 12:58 PM OFC/NFOEC www.ofcnfoec.org
5/10/2011 1:01 PM Smith Micro Software Inc smithmicro.com
5/10/2011 1:06 PM DisplayLink Corp displaylink.com
5/10/2011 4:18 PM Barracuda Networks www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/?L=en
5/10/2011 4:20 PM Brocade www.brocade.com
5/10/2011 4:40 PM Eaton Corporation eaton.com/powerquality
5/10/2011 6:31 PM Rackspace Hosting www.rackspace.com

They are all a blur already, but there were a number of interesting products that I saw.

Talked to someone at Eaton, who works out of Philly who specializes is Data Center air flow. Will come out and offer suggestions on how to save money on cooling.

CXtec sells refurbished VoIP phones. They can sell us phones just like we are using for significantly less than new. They come with lifetime warranties.

Safari Books online has thousands of technical books available digitally. You pay a monthly fee to access their entire library as much as you want. Todd, I know you have talked to me about this service, or one like it. It seems like a good deal for the department.

Compellent/Dell had a booth, which was separate from the Dell booth. I guess they had made their reservations before the merger.

I'm sure I'll remember more as I dig through the printed materials I picked up. That's it for now, though. I'm going to bed. Tomorrow will probably be just as exhausting as today was.

Session notes for Tuesday

2011-05-11T00:21:00.000-04:00

Today was a hectic and exhausting day. Didn't have much chance to blog on what I heard and saw. I didn't even have much opportunity to take notes. The three sessions I went to were standing room only, and there were 2 sessions that I couldn't get into the room for. It's pretty hard to type on an iPad when you are standing in the back of the room. A laptop would not have been any better. Also, there were no tables, just rows of chairs, so even when I could sit, it wasn't very conducive to typing.

I went to a panel discussion on the future of wireless. The panelists were entertaining. They felt that WiMax will die and LTE will take over in the cell phone arena. They expect that even Clear will shift from WiMax to LTE in the next year or two. Even though both Verizon and AT&T are going to LTE, they will be incompatible because one is doing time division multiplexing and the other is doing frequency division multiplexing. Apparently Verizon is once again picking the solution that very few other carriers around the world are going to. The panelists reffered to Verizon as the orphan child in this respect. There was a little discussion of what's beyond 802.11n and whether we need gigabit wireless or not. The consensus was that 802.11n will be around for quite a while, so companies shouldn't wait on the next standard. They also mentioned that Microsoft recently announced that they are purchasing Skype for $8 Billion!

I went to the second set of keynotes at 1 p.m. They were marketing presentations by Microsoft, Juniper and IBM. Nothing particularly interesting to say, but the cloud was mentioned a million times again. Referred to ask a fundamental change in the industry.

The next session I went to was about dealing with Mac and iOS devices coming into the enterprise. Alex Stamos was an excellent speaker and I was blown away with his depth of knowledge about security, protocols and how Mac, iOS devices, and everything else acted on the network. He had a lot of very scary things to say about security of data with mobile devices and how easy it is to do man-in-the middle attacks even when you are using carriers. He talked about how important it was to try and write apps that didn't store sensitive data on the mobile devices. Use the cloud to grab the data when needed.

The last session I went to was about Network Futures. There were 5 speakers from various network electronics vendors. Unfortunately, they all gave marketing spiels, so there was very little good content. I left early and hit the exhibit floor.

That's all on the sessions today. I'll do another post on the exhibit hall itself.