No matter what sport you play -basketball, football, or surfing -your coach will say you need a strong foundation to master it.

Just as in any practice, you need to understand the fundamentals to master data center technologies. This way, you will know how to ride the waves of transformation, understanding exactly what is needed in the data center and why.  And, you won't be easily talked into buying solutions you don't need.

The good news is, today, Tom Edsall is your coach! It's like going to a swimming class, and finding out Michael Phelps is your teacher. Tom is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Data Center Networking Group at Cisco Systems, and a guest lecturer at Stanford university where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.

As part of the Cisco DC Innovations Chalk Talk series, Tom will walk you through the fundamentals of building a modern data center, what it takes to meet key requirements, and what Cisco data center has to offer to help you get there.

Overview: Active Queue Management in Nexus 9000 Data Center Switches

Tom Edsall explains why smart buffering is more beneficial than deep buffering. He discusses the theory of operation of the Active Fair Discard (AFD), combined with Elephant Traps that make up two of the main pillars of how active queue management, aka Smart Buffers, is done on the Nexus 9000.

The Ideal Data Center Fabric

When considering data center infrastructure, you must look at a solution that provides a strong network foundation with growth capabilities and a return on investment. This video will help explain how Cisco ACI enables you to achieve scale, security, high reliability and availability, visibility and analytics all while simplifying day to day operations and helping IT be more responsive and deliver a robust and agile infrastructure to their respective lines of business.

Cisco ACI Multi-Site Data-Plane Architecture

Learn how to deploy globally distributed data center networks using a very scalable and highly reliable/available solution. Explore the benefits of SDN by looking at the industry leading SDN solution -Cisco ACI. With the ability to scale and deliver granular and consistent policy to any given location, Cisco ACI Multi-Site delivers a single point of orchestration across the network as well as creates a simplified fault isolation domain thus simplifying operations. This video will focus on the ACI Multi-Site data plane architecture explaining how we handle packet addressing and how we forward packets between sites.

Data Center Innovations: Cisco Takes the Lead

Your data center is a critical component of your digital transformation journey. As you make your investment, it is imperative you choose the right data center technology partner. This video will help customers better understand how Cisco has innovated and evolved its data center portfolio to deliver agility, high availability and superior performance. Learn from Tom Edsall and Roland Acra on the latest Cisco Data Center innovations. Those include: Nexus 9000 data center switches, built on Cisco's CloudScale ASICs; Cisco ACI -the industry leading SDN solution; and Cisco Tetration and Cisco Network Assurance Engine -Cisco's new Machine Learning based security and network assurance solutions.

How to Deliver New Levels of Scale in the Data Center

With the explosive growth of traffic resulting from IoT and 5G mobile networks, data center operators struggle daily to accommodate scale -providing sufficient infrastructure to facilitate more demanding IT requirements (compute, storage and network needs). In this video Tom Edsall, SVP and CTO of Cisco Data Center Group, explains how we have implemented an innovative approach to help our customers and in turn deliver an intelligent architecture  with Cisco ACI to scale their data center networks today and in the future.

Data Center Innovation Series: Intelligent Buffer Management

Tom Edsall explains why smart or intelligent buffering in data center switches is far more valuable than big buffers. He also details how Nexus 9000's ASIC and buffering technologies can best handle mixed traffic data center environments.  Cisco intelligent buffer management includes approximate fair dropping (AFD) with elephant trap (ETRAP), and dynamic packet prioritization (DPP) functions. It uses an algorithm-based architectural approach to address the buffer requirements in modern data centers. It offers a cost-effective and sustainable solution to support the ever-increasing network speed and data traffic load.

Data Center Innovation Series: Switch Buffer Requirements in Networking

Learn why deep buffers are not enough and how to make better investments for your data center. Tom Edsall explains the fundamentals of buffer requirements in networking for long-lived TCP and Incast or microburst traffic.

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