Cisco Announces Champions for 2016

ciscochampion2016On Friday last week, Cisco started sending out email welcoming those people who have been selected to receive the Cisco Champion designation for 2016.

For those of you not familiar with it, Cisco Champion is Cisco’s community recognition program. Its main goal is to encourage and recognize knowledge-sharing efforts. To quote from the welcome email:

Cisco Champions are a group of highly-influential IT technical experts who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and thoughts across the social web and with Cisco. The Cisco Champion program encompasses a diverse set of areas such as Data Center, Internet of Things, Enterprise Networks, Collaboration, and Security.

I am simultaneously pleased, honored, and humbled to have been named a Cisco Champion for Data Center for the third year in a row. I look forward to meeting and working with the other Cisco Champions, which, this year includes three of my co-workers at Accunet Solutions.

For Your Listening Pleasure: Cisco Champion Radio Season 3, Ep 2 is Live

Cisco Champion 2015Earlier this week, I got to play the role of a guest-host/panelist on the Cisco Champion Radio podcast, talking about tech predictions for 2016. It was a very lively conversation and a lot of fun.

If you’re interested in hearing it, you can find it:

Or, you could listen to it right here:

If you have any thoughts to add to the conversation, feel free to do so in the comments below.

Guest-Hosting Cisco Champion Radio Next Week

Cisco Champion 2015I’ve written before about the various community programs I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in and how I’ve benefited from them. I’ve just been given another unexpected benefit that should be a lot of fun.

The Cisco Champion community records a weekly podcast titled Cisco Champion Radio. Over the past two years, they’ve covered a broad variety of topics — you can see the full list of previous episodes here.

On Tuesday 19 January, I will be helping to guest-host Season Three, Episode 2 of Cisco Champion Radio. We’ll be talking about IT predictions for 2016. Apparently, I unconsciously predicted this topic, so naturally I accepted the invitation to guest-host.

If you’re a Cisco Champion, please join us to share your thoughts on what’s coming. If you’re not, don’t worries — I’ll post a link to the episode as soon as it’s available.

Cisco Expands Storage Networking Porfolio

Today, Cisco announced the expansion of their MDS storage networking portfolio with the addition of three new products. These new products bring increased performance, automation, and ease-of-use to an already great product line.

The new products announced are:

  • MDS 9148S Fabric Switch
  • MDS 9706 Multilayer Director
  • MDS 9700 FCoE Line Card

I’ll walk through the new offerings below. Continue reading