Gadgetory

two decades ago network administrators and IT teams provisioned new devices secured them and maintained them manually most often VA slow tedious and error-prone command-line interface these days there are certainly automated tools to make large-scale deployments easier but by and large the nuts and bolts work is still done exactly the same way why well that's a great question and it's one that Cisco sponsored a little jaunt over to their Vancouver office here to explore so let's find out tell me the answer is that it doesn't have to be that way anymore and the Cisco folks created a fun little demo for me to show you guys what they're calling intent-based networking so to get things started I go ahead and connect to their Wi-Fi and then right away I get a ping from the community bought built into WebEx teams with some useful information to help me find my way after a short conversation community bought or CB as I like to call it let me know that the people I'm supposed to meet are in the quad room and then asks if I'd like a group chat where I can arrange to join them invite them for coffee or do whatever it is that executive types do on a Friday afternoon turns out with the Cisco folks it's grabbing pints surprisingly cool here by the way 10 out of 10 would paint again anyway the next part of the demo was supposed to have me have some kind of Wi-Fi trouble with video streaming or something but it was really hard for an office full of Cisco access points to have Wi-Fi troubles so I'm just gonna have to walk you guys through like a hypothetical what could have happened now 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi isn't as fast as 5 gigahertz but it still has one key advantage range the problem is that the instant someone fires up one of those puppies it basically jams every 2.4 gigahertz device in the vicinity so a Cisco intent-based network can be constantly monitoring for this kind of interruption it can let CB know so she can make sure that you're not like tearing your hair out trying to you know find a spot with better reception or something stupid like that and then this is the part where it gets really crazy she can even fix it for you in the background moving you over to a 5 gigahertz channel or recommending that you do so yourself depending on your configuration like this is the kind of thing that for years has been impractical or even impossible with traditional troubleshooting because by the time attack were to wade their way over here through the cue of my printer won't print messages and finally get to my desk to diagnose my Wi-Fi well you know Barney from accountings lunch is not only not in the microwave anymore it's like down the street there at the treatment plant and so anything intermittent like that has been traditionally very hard to diagnose that is why we needed a new way and before you freak out the idea behind this data collection is not to get rid of the entire IT staff but rather to stop wasting their time now Internet of Things has become kind of like an annoying buzzword but that doesn't change that the sheer number of connected devices that needs to be managed per IT staffer is gonna explode when a room like this one goes from you know three ethernet jacks over here and a handful of people on their laptops over there to every you know phone and and thermostat and speaker and TV and even lightbulb having its own connection I mean you don't want to be provisioning every stupid light individually do you although that that said the jokes about how many sis admin's does it take to change a lightbulb do basically write themselves at that point the idea here is with intent based networking the manual work goes away so you plug the light in it announces itself then based on its identification it can be provisioned on the network secured and then cord it off from higher priority devices like say for example a video streaming smartboard over here and all of that without the lengthy setup process because remember guys even 5 minutes is a long time when you're doing it a thousand times like you would with the lights in an office building like this one and hidden away in this corner of what they call the lab are some of the hardware keys to what's going on here so this this right here is their 4800 series access point and this is one unique piece of kit because in addition to being a sick Wi-Fi access point it has dedicated hardware to gather location data like remember how the network was helping me find my colleagues from before so you used to be able to find out where a user was but the old way used multiple access points to triangulate location frankly it didn't work very well the new way uses what's called a phased antenna array to detect nanosecond differences in the time of arrival of beaconing signals from your device to determine where you are to within a meter and it can do it even if you aren't actually connected to the hotspot I can't believe they're just letting me wander around in here like there is no one supervising me right now then there's these guys here so this here is a pair of Cisco's catalyst 9000 switches which are apparently selling like hotcakes these not only do real-time monitoring but they can actually going back to our microwave example log data as well to help DNA Center which is the software brain that controls the whole operation find patterns that will make diagnosing intermittent issues much easier and DNA Center enables some other fancy tricks so with encrypted data which is becoming more and more common the content of a data packet can be read directly by the piece of equipment that is traveling through so whether it's an unauthorized user trying to gain access to the network or a nasty malware in a Word document you can't see it but using machine learning it can look at the behavior of it how big it is where it's going what it's trying to do and then using decades of experience along with AI and machine learning it can get with a high degree of accuracy this packet is bad and this one is safe now obviously this stuff isn't perfect yet this is this is just the beginning I mean I got to tell you guys çb let me down big time when I asked for directions to the bathroom for example so it is a really good thing that Anju is here because that could have been a really bad scene but that's okay because the point of this technology isn't replacing people anyway it's about leveraging the power of the community developers that Cisco is building called dev net to make our networks more efficient and more secure through software if the network itself is a software platform then it can use all the data that it has data that would have otherwise been wasted intelligently based on intent whether that's the intent of the administrator or the intent of the user that's intent based networking and a really cool example of this was completed just last year at UBC's main library so they were able to use location data from student smartphones to determine which parts of the building needed air-conditioning and heating and they were able to save seven percent on their energy costs that is a big deal and frankly a fairly rudimentary example so for the network admins out there the message here is that it might be time to start dabbling in programmability and as for you developers well it might be time for you to explore the networking side too and you can both learn more at developer so thanks to Cisco for sponsoring this video and thanks to you guys for watching if it sucked you guys know where that button is but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should definitely join so do you need some tech tips I got nothing for you oh so it's just still going we broke Cisco's microwave