Review of the Cisco CRS-​​3 Marketing Debacle

The Cisco Marketing team kicked sand in the their own face with a fail­ure to com­pre­hend what cus­tom­ers want, and expect­ing them to com­pre­hend what a BFR is for. The claim that “Internet will never be the same again” got a massive cold shoulder when they announced another big router.

What Might It Mean if Cisco Dumps HP as Certified Partner ?

Thinking through the impact of the breakup between Cisco and HP as announced on Silicon Angle.

Cisco: Questions I Have About Cisco, UCS and the Market

I was recently asked to con­sider Cisco and their UCS and whether it is ready for adop­tion. This raised a num­ber of ques­tions that I’d like to have answers for.

DDOS — a Problem Bigger Than You Can Ever Be

Taking data from the Arbor Networks DDOS report for 2009 and apply­ing it to real life makes for some ugly choices.

Can You Learn Anything From Google or Facebook Data Centers ?

Google and Facebook have been puff­ing them­selves up about how clever they are at solv­ing tech­nical prob­lems. Is it just cheap mar­ket­ing, and is there actu­ally any­thing that Enterprise com­put­ing can learn from what they have shared ?

Blessay: Why I Think IP Telephony Is Over (and I’m Not Studying CCIE Voice)

I think that IP Telephony is over and the whole idea of in house PBX is gently fad­ing away to be replaced by Presence and Mobile phones.

Is This the Year of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the LAN ?

A num­ber of switch vendors have announced (and they are cer­tainly hop­ing) that 10Gb Ethernet is the THING for 2010. Really ?

This Year I’m Working Harder on Mistakes

One of my res­ol­u­tion for the com­ing dec­ade is to accept my mis­takes grace­fully and learn from them.

FCoE Isn’t a Replacement for Infiniband, It’s a Cheaper Copy That Customers Will Buy

There is some mis­con­cep­tion by many in the stor­age industry that FCoE is some type of replace­ment for Infiniband. My view is that FCoE is cheaper, dumber but MARKETABLE alternative.

Drobo — Guessing How BeyondRAID Creates Space and Volumes

I got a present­a­tion from the Drobo on their new products, but I find the idea of bey­on­dRAID and their idea of dynam­ic­ally re-​​architecting the drive array to find the optimum and redund­ant con­fig­ur­a­tion to be abso­lutely fascinating.

Cisco, EMC, VMware — Living Together Isn’t the Same as Married

A bunch of CEO’s prom­ising to play ‘nice’ with each oth­ers toys is not a con­vin­cing mar­ket­ing exer­cise. Cisco and EMC/​VMware need to merge to get big enough to com­pete with HP /​ IBM.

Blessay: Working for a Reseller or End User Is Different Like Doctoring and Parenting

Where you choose to work in the Networking Industry can come to down to a simple choice: Are you a Doctor or a Parent ?

Blessay: Sixty Five Percent — Cisco’s Gross Profit Margin

Lets be hon­est, there are many things that Cisco does well, and some things that Cisco doesn’t do well. Somebody once said that being a suc­cess­ful com­pany is to do more good things than bad.
For me, one area that is becom­ing a big­ger and big­ger design prob­lem is the price on Cisco products. Recently I took more notice of […]

DCB, CEE or DCE ? Whose Term Is Best ?

FibreChannel over Ethernet (FCoE) is com­ing to your data centre. The prob­lem is that FCoE doesn’t work prop­erly on ordin­ary eth­er­net switches. What do I mean by “prop­erly” ? We need new stand­ards to let it reach its poten­tial but there are too many acronyms.

Putty, the Command Line and NO Clicky Clicky

While it may be a per­sonal pref­er­ence for me, I believe that you should only use the mouse when you don’t know what are doing. If you have a repet­it­ive task, then click­ing the same thing over and over shows that you are poor engin­eer. Lets hack putty to work from the com­mand line.

IOS: Setting Terminal Window Length

Why does IOS always make you press the ‘more’ key all the time when dis­play­ing configs ?

Changing the Break Character in Cisco IOS

Does press­ing “Ctrl-​​Shift-​​6 & x” bother you ? It bugs the hell the out of me.

Networking Is Cloud Ready. But Where Is Network Management ?

Doug Gourlay recently pos­tu­lated that the Networking Industry was not ready for Cloud Computing, and there are no answers to the tech­nical chal­lenges that lie ahead. What a load of tosh. All we need is pas­tel col­ours and roun­ded corners and we are there.

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