Have you seen the vBrownBag Tech Talks at previous conferences or maybe checked them out on YouTube? If not, I highly recommend it. If you're not familiar with vBrownBag it is actually several things! For one, it's a weekly podcast (or videocast, really) with different guest hosts every week who usually give about an hour presentation and demo on various technologies. vBrownBag has also taken on a strong role at tech conferences by allowing presenters from every arena give lightning tech talks that are streamed live as well as recorded for later viewing on YouTube. In essence, it's an awesome and free way to get and give information.

Cisco has long supported the vBrownBag effort and we will be participating in the vBrownBag Tech Talks on Monday evening at 5:30pm in the Hang Space at VMworld. Instead of doing what we normally do, which is one person giving a presentation, we've decided to do a panel session with some of the fantastic folks from the Insieme BU including Joe Onisick, Carly Stoughton, Yogesh Kaushik, and me (Lauren Malhoit) as the moderator.

I'm excited about this panel session for several reasons. For one, I'm also a part of the vBrownBag crew so it's always fun when these two worlds collide. More than that, though, is getting to hear these brilliant people talk about new features in Application Centric Infrastructure. While there are several new features in the new release of ACI, the panel will be concentrate on the new Troubleshooting Wizard, ACI Optimizer, which is a capacity planning tool, and last but not least the enhanced microsegmentation offerings. Not only are we utilizing dynamic end point groups to enable microsegmentation, we've also included a distributed firewall which can do stateful packet inspection between end point groups.

While security is so important, it can sometimes come at the cost of what we refer to as an "open" model. However, Cisco actually has the largest partner ecosystem of any SDN solutions in its class while still maintaining a highly secure and compliant fabric (check out this whitepaper on security and compliance). We're actually trying to help our customers avoid vendor lock-in by using open protocols (Ex: OpFlex with multiple hypervisors and cloud orchestration tools).

If you're at VMworld, stop by the Hang Space any time to see the vBrownBag Tech Talks, but especially Monday at 5:30pm. If you can't make it to VMworld you can always watch it live from the vBrownBag site or you'll be able to find the video later on YouTube. If you have any questions for the panel, please comment below and we'll try to address them!