I’m running or participating in five workshops or sessions during next week’s Interop New York. Three of them build on each other, so you might want to attend all of them in sequence:

Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds starts with requirements gathering phase and focuses on physical infrastructure design decisions covering compute, storage, physical and virtual networking, and network services. If you plan to build a private (or a reasonable small public) cloud, start here.

Designing the Virtual Network for Software-Defined Data Center describes the SDDC components: overlay virtual networks, virtualized network services, and distributed virtual firewalls. This one goes way deeper into the SDDC details than the previous one, but of course there will be some overlap (unless everyone attends the morning workshop first, in which case I’ll just skip the overlapping parts and focus on the interesting details).

Following a Packet through the Virtual Data Center is a deep dive into packet forwarding behavior of various overlay virtual networking solutions. It describes layer-2 technologies (VXLAN), distributed L2/L3 forwarding (VMware NSX, Nuage VSP), pure layer-3 solutions (Hyper-V, Juniper Contrail) and layer-2 and layer-3 gateways.

Software-Defined Networking and Network Virtualization is a full-day workshop describing SDN technologies (including OpenFlow), architectures, and deployment considerations. A must-see dose of reality if your boss started mentioning SDN in every second sentence after a visit from his favorite $vendor or $analyst.

Finally, I’m attending the Sensible Steps for Network Upgrade panel. Based on the list of topics we’ll discuss and the participants this might be a fun one to attend.

Finally, if you’d like to sit down with me sometime next week and discuss the challenges of data center technologies, scalable cloud infrastructure, overlay virtual networks or SDN, send me an email (or use the contact form).