Learn to Teach Yourself

Image by AustinEvan on Flickr

I changed jobs at the end of October and while leaving many of my colleagues behind was difficult it’s been great to get stuck into learning a new network and working with some different technologies.

In the last few weeks I’ve been designing and configuring an expansion of an existing datacentre.  This has given me a great opportunity to sit down and read through design guides and configuration docs on both the Cisco Nexus 5k range of switches and the Cisco ACE4170.  Before this I didn’t really know anything in detail on these devices other than general awareness and various bits and bobs I’d picked up from my compatriots on Twitter.

Both of these technologies gave me plenty to learn about – they both have their fair share of limitations and restrictions on how they can be deployed and both have subtle CLI differences that have entailed scrabbling through documents, scratching heads and asking questions of those better versed in these areas than me (thanks @EriksonIan!).  These gotchas ranged from the trivial (not knowing about the “trunk” parameter to “spanning-tree port type edge”) to the more fundamental (understanding how vPC works).

It was while I was finalising the configs that I realised I’d taught myself an awful lot during the last few weeks – technologies that I had never touched were almost becoming second nature and I was starting to feel vaguely competent (but hopefully not dangerously so).  This thought took me back to my University days – the program leader of the course I was studying had a phrase that he trotted our with regularity that was basically to the effect of:

It’s only now that I can see how true that statement was.  The best people I have ever worked with have all had an extremely good grasp of the fundamentals and the ability to take a new technology, new product, new service – whatever it may be – and make sense of the knowledge and put it to good use.

My personal #1 piece of advice to any aspiring techie would have to be: “Learn how to teach yourself”.  Find out what it takes for you to learn something in-depth and retain that knowledge.  It could be that reading documentation or 3rd party books is enough for you.  You might find that labbing something up and putting practical skills to work works better, or that audio/video-based training is what you need.

Whatever it may be – find a way that works for you and go put it to good use!

Getting Started with Cisco Nexus

One of the cool things about working as a network engineer is learning and investigating new technologies.  At my place of work we’ve recently been looking long and hard at the Cisco Nexus product line for both 10Gb Ethernet and FC.  In fact, as soon as the new 5596UP and 5548UP (Universal Port) models were released, we knew these switches would meet our needs.

The Nexus range, for those who’ve missed this bandwagon entirely, is based on the NX-OS software platform rather than the traditional Cisco IOS.  I don’t think any experienced network engineer could find a reason to dislike this – IOS has many glaring faults (both architecturally and from a CLI perspective) and NX-OS (which was originally the SAN-OS software from the MDS line of SAN switches) has built a pretty good reputation for reliability.  This is hardly surprising; storage engineers tend to get somewhat excited when their hosts’ storage paths are pulled out from underneath them due to a fabric switch dying…

One “not-really” problem of this is that engineers need to get their head around NX-OS and the Nexus platform and while the learning curve isn’t steep, it’s worth knowing the differences between the two platforms and having a good idea of the product range before you go shopping.  To this end I’ve put together a list of useful Nexus resources that I’ve been working with over the last month or two while we investigated the capabilities of these products.  I hope it’s useful to you!

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