Data Center design , a LLD and a meeting in middle earth

on webex meetings you can't really tell where any one is now can you, for all I know Gandalf and Frodo are on the call while flying over the shire....

So it was around 3pm (Monday) and a meeting request pops up. Easy I tell my self, open it, two attachments hmm...pdf- well we can read that. double click, takes a while to load up, double click the other one just so we can at least have a clue on what both are:

Document 1: - LLD from from cisco on UCS design
Document 2: - another one for the DCI - Data center interconnect.

Total: 220 Pages. Review and discuss on Tuesday.

Well my DC-fu sucks, rather sucked, my experience with NX-OS never went beyond me drooling over the boxes and marvelling and dreaming at all the adventures I'll have with the shiny box, and al those modules you can pull out on a nexus 7K....awesome...by the way if you did a data center before 2009, the skills are not transferable, so many changes in there, its all about virtualization now, many more services, fancy terms...aiyaiyaiii...

Lets go back a bit: last month I had purchased or rather loaded Interconnecting Data Centers Using VPLS (Ensure Business Continuance on Virtualized Networks by Implementing Layer 2 Connectivity Across Layer 3) to my bookshelf on safari. (now I know vpls is a terrible choice for DCI, i also know why), I also went through most of the DC webinars  (I can't think of a better educational investment than Ivan's webinars and a yearly Safaribooks subscription) and re-learnt the difference between OTV,VPLS and pseudowire) a separate post will describe how and why we use them here (I work for a telco).

So yes I think I moved from novice to just about clueful in a month. Today we have a kickoff meeting where I'll try and show off all my wondrous knowledge in the hope someone decides Im fit to be let loose on the shiny boxes....Yes I managed to go through the documents at a price....Im still sleepy, coffee doesn't seem to be helping much....