“Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation” – RFC-1925

Today I received a late Christmas present (to myself), it arrived, strapped to a pallet like King Kong! The Cisco Catalyst 6509-E, the mac daddy of switches.

So here’s the why… my wife had been asking/nagging me to furnish my home office for some time to make it more visually appealing, “buy a table, some storage, put some art on the wall, something!”. I thought long and hard about this and after ruling out a trip to Ikea or Athena (shows how long i haven’t left the house for) I landed on something which served me so well in the past, the ever dependable and versatile, Cat 6500. 10 years ago when I was designing data centre and campus networks one of these bad boy’s fully loaded would set you back £75k approx, I picked this up for £75 on ebay, and it works! Requirement for table, storage and art – Met.

While marvelling at this magnificent beast it got me thinking about work and how much technology has changed over the last 10 years which got me thinking about an old RFC and a quote from it “every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation”. The Cat 6500 is a router, switch, load balancer, firewall and VPN in one. If we fast forward to today and take Gartner’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) conceptual architecture into consideration, SASE is the convergence of networking and security capabilities, consolidation of point products, performed at the edge. I started to wonder if the Cat 6500 was the SASE of its day?

Today, users and applications are highly distributed and the data centre is no longer the centre of gravity which means a completely different architectural approach is required to provide connectivity and security, enter SASE, the conceptual architecture and Zscaler, the platform and enabler to actually deliver secure connectivity regardless of where the user and application is.

This is why I no longer design data centres and why a Cat 6500 is now my coffee table. “The future of network security is in the cloud” – Gartner.