Although it’s almost three months till the start of the Building Next-Generation Data Center online course, we already have most of the guest speakers. Today I’d like to introduce the first two (although they need no introduction).

You might have heard about Russ White. He was known as Mr. CCDE when that program started and recently focused more on data centers, open networking and whitebox switching. He’s also an authority on good network design and architecture, network complexity, and tradeoffs you have to make when designing a network.

Russ already had a guest presentation covering various aspects of open networking in the data center course; this time I invited him to start the course with a presentation about network complexity and tradeoffs – a topic we conveniently ignore way too many times.

Remember Network Security Princess (aka MrsYisWhy), a security guru surviving PCI DSS nightmare and using available tools instead of buying vendor snake oil? She disappeared for a few years and emerged on a totally different planet focused on DevOps. She’ll talk about what she’s learned while being there helping DevOps teams cope with traditional infrastructure and security engineers.

I’ve seen an early version of her presentation and I can promise a lively and controversy-filled hour ;)

Interested? There’s only one thing you have to do to become part of a large and growing community of data center-focused network engineers: register now.