2011 was a great year for the networking industry with a major focus in the data center. This was a year of many announcements ranging from many topics/companies/technologies,  including VXLAN, OTV,LISP, L2 DCI, and traffic trombones, Fabric Path, SPB/TRILL, 802.1BR, OpenFlow, SDN, Big Switch, Nicira, Embrane, scale out architectures, Hadoop and its impact on the network, virtual  switching, virtual L4-L7 services, Fabric based architectures, 40GbE switching, tunnels, overlays, and the list goes on. 

This was also the year I joined and started using twitter, just two months ago (and very glad I did), and found industry experts such as @ioshints, @bradhedlund, @etherealmind, @packetpushers, @ecbanks, @cloudtoad, @networkjanitor, and @scott_lowe just to name a few.  Shortly after is when I started this blog.

As @networkjanitor said recently in a tweet to @bradhedlund, “As usual, another great post! You explained perfectly some of the random thoughts rattling around in my head,” and I could not agree more – that goes to the all of the blogs these guys write.  Literally, in the past few weeks there have been many times I’m getting back from a customer or a normal day at work thinking about a technology/topic, and sure enough, one of these guys had just posted about it!  Sometimes I think they are mind readers, but best of all, I appreciate their different perspectives on the various topics they post about.