Happy New Year readers! Last year was a great year for our Rethink Performance Blog and we really enjoyed writing on key topics that are important to the network performance management market.

We've introduced a few new faces to our whiteboard video series but today our CTO, Vess Bakalov is back with two new videos. The topic of both videos is Advanced NetFlow.

In February 2011 the IANA assigned the last top level (/8) block of free IPv4 addresses. Although the standard for IPv6 was proposed in the mid-late 1990s, to date mostly the government and educational institutions and service providers serving these markets have deployed IPv6 in their networks. Needless to say, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will only accelerate from here on out due to the significant explosion in mobile devices like tablets and smart phones; IP addresses are being consumed at much faster rates than in the early 2000s.

 We have featured many of our whiteboard videos on our blog the past few months but wanted to post a recap of which ones are the most popular among our audience. To view, you can either click any of the thumbnail images or the title link.

In wrapping up my epic series of blogs on Cisco Live, I admit that this is the most I have ever blogged in one week, and I am late getting this recap blog out. Cisco Live 2011 was a great event for us again this year, and as a Gold Sponsor we spent a lot of time and money on both the Las Vegas and London events. In addition to being one of our biggest lead generation events, Cisco Live provides us with strong corporate, industry, and partner presence, and a venue to launch new product capabilities.

Day 3 at the Cisco Live 2011 World of Solutions was slower. There was no reception to drive traffic, and burnout was clearly in evidence from all of the intense technical sessions and the vendor parties the night before. And there was the customer appreciation event featuring Train to get ready for (nap time?).

It’s that exciting time of year again! No, I’m not talking about the holiday season; Monday July 11 is the first day of Cisco Live 2011. We have been working for months to prepare our team for the show. From designing our booth pictured below to making sure that everyone is looking their best, preparing for this show has been quite a team effort.

Being a Cisco Developer Network Partner is key to our business. It ensures that the SevOne platform is collecting and instrumenting all of the vital performance data available from Cisco’s vast array of networking technologies. Performance data from Cisco’s networking equipment provides real-time visibility that customers demand. To read more about our Cisco relationship, please refer to our partner datasheet, Managing Your Cisco Network Performance.  Also, Patrica Costa, a Cisco product manager on the medianet team, was kind enough to write this blog: SevOne Performance Appliance Solution (SevOne PAS™) supports Cisco Performance Monitor.

This  was my 15^th consecutive year attending Interop and consequently, my 15^th consecutive year having been to Las Vegas. Fortunately, I have managed to never spend a dime gambling. I have seen many changes to Interop over the years, the good and the not so good.

SevOne is an industry leader in support for NetFlow and other flow-based technologies, and has been working closely with Cisco to maximize the value of Flexible NetFlow for application delivery, including latency, jitter, and packet loss reporting for Medianet applications. By leveraging flexible fields in NetFlow v9, Medianet performance monitor provides data that typically requires polling or separate tools to obtain. This substantially closes the gap with packet-based instrumentation, and therefore dramatically reduces overall management costs, while accelerating a network manager’s ability to optimize and improve the network in support of key business applications.