Networking Field Day 11 is tomorrow and will be live streaming this Thursday, January 21^st, from 2:00-4:00pm.

For the uninitiated, Tech Field Day is an event hosted by Cisco where delegates come and listen to a technical deep dive by a Cisco expert in a presentation and discussion format. These delegates range from bloggers, speakers, freelance writers, and podcasters that have a public presence that has an immense influence on ways that products and companies are perceived by IT practitioners. There are a few different branches of Tech Field Day: Networking Field Day, Wireless Field Day, Virtualization Field Day, and Storage Field Day.

#NFD11 will be a two-hour session where we'll showcase a few different Cisco technologies to 12 delegates. We'll be discussing the provisioning of Nexus switches using Puppet, IOS 16.x, Programmable Fabric Using VXLAN/BGP-EVPN, and LED lighting powered by Cisco Catalyst switches. Before we dive into those topics, we'll kick-off our session with an introduction from Senior Director of Data Center and Enterprise Switching Carl Solder.

Jeff McLaughlin, a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer, will start off our Networking Field Day and will give an overview of configuration management tools. Specifically, he will focus on Puppet to configure and maintain Nexus switches. Jeff will also provide a live demo of switch configuration using Puppet, along with a walk-through of the required Puppet code.

Next one of our Product Managers for Enterprise Switching, Jagbir Kang, will follow Jeff and will be giving a white boarding demonstration highlighting on the IOS XE Denali 16.1.1 release. This release is the starting point for a series of innovations that will grow across Cisco's Enterprise platforms over the next few years.

Jagbir will be discussing the two switching platforms namely Catalyst 3850 and Catalyst 3650 and show the plans to support routing platforms (ASR1K, CSR1Kv, ISR4K) in IOS XE Denali 16.2.1.

She will talk about the functionality of a common software-stack bringing in feature consistency, which allows users to run any feature anywhere. You will also see the cross-platform integrated model and how it enhances customer experience through simplified lifecycle management, which has shown easier deployment and qualification processes.

Principal Technical Marketing Engineer Lukas Krattiger will then discuss the details around Cisco's Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) EVPN solution and give a deeper look on the combined L2/L3 Gateway at the top-of-rack (ToR). He will also touch on how to efficiently connect the VXLAN EVPN Fabric to Multi-Tenant WAN services.

Himanshu Mehra, Product Manager for Enterprise Switching, will be discussing how smart building use-cases are driving yet (un)connected devices like lights and sensors to converge onto a standard digital infrastructure and deliver compelling business outcomes.  This session will highlight the key drivers and talk about the new capabilities for connectivity, on-boarding, security and management that will enable this transformation.

Tune in tomorrow for the live stream to hear from these Cisco experts and see what the delegates have to say: Click here.