Jacob Koch

Background

About Jacob Koch

I thoroughly enjoy my role as a Systems Engineer with Extreme Networks. I am also a Fabric Networking resource for the West Coast. I have 20+ years of networking experience. I started in the Cisco Network Academy and went thru CCNA and CCNP which gave me a great base of networking knowledge. After the network academy, I went straight into Telcom and became a Central Office technician and then a LAN/WAN/Wireless 'Business Technician' and finally a WAN Engineer before I joined Extreme. My CCNA/CCNP combined with my Telecom and Install experience made learning Extreme Fabric Connect a joy! I immediately saw the simplification and ease of implementation that Fabric Connect brought to the table. I can honestly say that had I known about Fabric Connect when I was an installer I would have had more time back in my life! Extreme Fabric Connect is based on SPBm (SPBM is a standard in 802.1aq and RFC 6329) and incorporates many service provider techniques along with a control plane (IS-IS) to 'fix' Ethernet and create the industry's simplest Fabric Network technology, with no external expensive controllers to buy or maintain and no additional control planes required which would add to convergence time and create complexity. An Ethernet-based fabric network makes sense since everything already knows how to ride on ethernet, so fixing ethernet by adding a control plane, getting rid of Spanning Tree between fabric switches instead of layering on additional controls planes with STP still under the hood shows the pragmatic elegance that the creators of Fabric Connect brought to the table to finally tame the wildly rigid and complex traditional network! And not to mention, Fabric Connect has been field-proven for more than a decade. If you are new to networking or a 2 decade-plus veteran you will enjoy this technology! I truly love to teach people about this technology because I have first-hand experience with the old rigid ways of networking and this technology is architected to fix them! Reach out today, I would be happy to show you a live demo and or whiteboard, in-person (Las Vegas) or remote via ZOOM or Teams, I will buy lunch and I can guarantee you will enjoy the session or you can buy me lunch;)