Monday, April 12, 2010

Cisco SAMI blades....and ASA 5580's







I have worked for the last 3 or so years now with the cisco GGSN/CSG aka CMX (Cisco Mobile Exchange) supporting gsm,gprs and UMTS on the 7613 platform.

The old boxes were getting sort of old and tired, They also have the new ASR5000 (starent acquisition) that I believe to be by far more superior than what they were pushing.

Anyway pending some decisions, cisco being the nice guys they are actually sent some brand new toys for me to test. Please see attached....this is going to be a great week:-) I get to lab up the entire topology and integrate the new toys:-)

**Last three images are the sami blades







I also get to play around with the Cisco ASA 5580 with GTP inspection licence. Now this has been on my wish list for a while now. Swapping out the almost old firewalls for re-deployment will be easy. The fun is mainly in the higher number of supported interfaces and their capacity (10G), the gtp inspection will save our GGSN's quite alot of resources....oh well some photos (yes I opened them up to see what's in there).....

I'll post a review of both next time.....
I have some requests for easy to understand terms when dealing with gsm/gprs/umts mobility....I'll see about that too...Its just so wide I don't know where to start so if you have some ideas please let me know....

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

New direction?

Every once in a while I remind myself to update this blog. Trouble is most of the material Im working on for the CCIE has been posted somewhere. So apart from having some sort of online diary to keep track of stuff, I rarely see sense in making posts. so I don't. I keep detailed notes though...

I however realize that third world networkers can be about something else. How we do things here. I have been lucky to see/visit other networks for good enough comparisons. I can tell we are lagging behind in some areas .... I also happen to work on a large mobile network.

I can make this about how we run networks a bit differently on a tighter budget to satisfy totally different customer needs.

It can be about how we don't have a terrestial network to speak of and how we manage to get by.

It can be about how since I set up my first network until late last year (8years now), all international traffic was on satellite.

It can be about how a straight forward PCEF <==> pcrf<==>IN implementation can suddenly become complicated due to vendor use of proprietary protocols and how that has (a/no) place on tomorrows network.....

It can be tips on how to scale a CSG to carry more traffic than what Cisco originally posted on their page. Or how the Huawei GGSN compares to the ASR 5000.

It can be about me and what Im thinking about and all the cool stuff Im playing with...yes it can be about the ccie which is more a means to an end now....there just is no excitement....just need the digits to move on....cisco have made too many changes and contradictory remarks about this program its just tiring ... but i've worked too hard to stop now so.....lets see where this leads to....see you around