I will be traveling to Ireland at the end of this month and will be wanting to avoid hours of airplane engine noise plus actually listen to some music here and there. I did some looking around for new headphones for the trip and wanted some that did noise canceling but didn't cost a fortune like the Bose seem to. I finally ended up picking up some Skullcandy Proletariat headphones. They seem to work pretty well, work off of two AAA batteries and are only $100.
- Ed
Howfunky...a place with useless technical content!
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Cisco releases the Nexus 7000
I sat through some pretty good presentations yesterday at the Cisco Partner Data Center VT in San Jose and one of the cool new items that was covered is the new Nexus 7000 Switch platform. I think this switch is going to have some serious impact on where things are going. The platform has the ability to do both IP, Ethernet, Fiber Channel over Ethernet and other SAN based services and to perform at a 10Gbps scaling to 40Gbps and 100Gbps when the appropriate standards releases come out. It really is an remarkable piece of hardware. I imagine it is going to take awhile for adoption but I can't wait to get my hands on one to deploy! It really is going to be the next generation for large scale data center especially with virtual machine growth and blade and cluster configurations. The video on the site does a pretty good job explaining what it can do.
- Ed
- Ed
Monday, December 10, 2007
Cisco releases the VSS 1440
Cisco released the Cisco VSS 1440 which, for those who are not in the know, is a pretty big deal. It is very apparent now that Cisco is moving more and more in the direction of virtualization for their platforms and in supporting virtual environments. I think this is a very good development and will bring about a whole new series of product innovations for the company.
This platform and the 3750E series platforms are now going to become the primary methods that data centers connect in a high available and redundant fashion large scale VMware VI3 deployments. The technology is well aligned and from a design and deployment standpoint you couldn't ask for much more. I hope they will add support soon for some of the service modules soon which would make this solution an absolute powerhouse. I am sure that is coming so I would have to say this puts Cisco back up on the pay attention list.
On a side note - it does appear that Cisco is trying much harder on the UC front with the release of Microsoft's OCS 2007 product. I hope they push even harder to innovate and get more robust client solutions out there for the UC platforms.
- Ed
This platform and the 3750E series platforms are now going to become the primary methods that data centers connect in a high available and redundant fashion large scale VMware VI3 deployments. The technology is well aligned and from a design and deployment standpoint you couldn't ask for much more. I hope they will add support soon for some of the service modules soon which would make this solution an absolute powerhouse. I am sure that is coming so I would have to say this puts Cisco back up on the pay attention list.
On a side note - it does appear that Cisco is trying much harder on the UC front with the release of Microsoft's OCS 2007 product. I hope they push even harder to innovate and get more robust client solutions out there for the UC platforms.
- Ed
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Microsoft OCS 2007 Launch
I attended the launch event last week and I have been thinking over what I really wanted to say about OCS. First, I think it is very cool product (Kudos to the team). Second, I think Microsoft is not marketing it correctly in the Enterprise space. Third, they have definately gotten Cisco's attention (I think I ran into more Cisco folks I know at the event then Microsoft folks if you can believe that.) Fourth, the guitar opening for the keynote was lame.
Ok, so, to my points. If you haven't played with OCS 2007 you should. I think the new MOC and presence features that they have put into this platform are very cool. If you are looking for a great presence and collaboration tool this should be on your list without a question.
Microsoft has been delivering a message of VoIP as you are (which just makes me think of a Nirvana song) and the majority of their published presentations on the topic of QoS is to say it is more important to deal with Quality of Experience (QoE.) They have taken the approach of Skype and Live Meeting and are utilizing a wideband codec that is very good at delivering high fidelity audio over questionable networks (think the unknown of the Internet.) Their argument is that if you design for the potential loss and latency you commonly see on the Internet then the product will perform just fine in a corporate enterprise environment. They have tailored their design philosophy this way and therefore they arrive at the QoE argument. They are not concerned with what the network is doing with QoS, they argue that the advances in the wideband codec handle those issues in almost all cases. They do request that you add bandwidth but they are saying do not bother to design QoS into the network at all.
Well, here is where I think they are missing the mark. Most enterprises UNDER provision in networks - especially on WAN's. No one ever gets praised for increasing a companies monthly recurring costs so for many enterprises adding more bandwidth is a very expensive proposition. In addition, many utilize QoS to prioritize line of business applications, data backup, replication, database functions, citrix and lots of other network traffic due to the limitations. They are willing to keeps costs in check and build a more measured approach to controlling their costs relative to what all their application needs are. With voice and video, they are simply another application riding on top of IP and therefore should be designed and accounted for in the same way. I think Microsoft is missing the main point for the enterprise, they need to redo what they are telling partners and customers about the best strategy for deploying because they have not accounted for the fact that for many companies they don't have a WAN that has unlimited BW potential. Perhaps they could argue that no one should get a WAN and that all infrastructure should run on the Internet since getting a relatively large pipe to the Internet is cheap - there may be something to that but we don't have room to talk about that now.
Since I work for a company that is both a Cisco Premier Partner and a Microsoft Certified Partner (plus others) it is interesting seeing the shake up at Cisco about what Microsoft is doing. I think Cisco is in an interesting position of having a much more mature and stable platform but one that is modeled in many ways on a traditional voice PBX. Microsoft has really stepped out of that model and is shaking things up. They are a long way away from having the feature sets and robustness that Cisco has today but some of the features that Microsoft has out in a 1.0 product is very impressive.
Well, more thoughts later but that gets the first wave done.
- Ed
Ok, so, to my points. If you haven't played with OCS 2007 you should. I think the new MOC and presence features that they have put into this platform are very cool. If you are looking for a great presence and collaboration tool this should be on your list without a question.
Microsoft has been delivering a message of VoIP as you are (which just makes me think of a Nirvana song) and the majority of their published presentations on the topic of QoS is to say it is more important to deal with Quality of Experience (QoE.) They have taken the approach of Skype and Live Meeting and are utilizing a wideband codec that is very good at delivering high fidelity audio over questionable networks (think the unknown of the Internet.) Their argument is that if you design for the potential loss and latency you commonly see on the Internet then the product will perform just fine in a corporate enterprise environment. They have tailored their design philosophy this way and therefore they arrive at the QoE argument. They are not concerned with what the network is doing with QoS, they argue that the advances in the wideband codec handle those issues in almost all cases. They do request that you add bandwidth but they are saying do not bother to design QoS into the network at all.
Well, here is where I think they are missing the mark. Most enterprises UNDER provision in networks - especially on WAN's. No one ever gets praised for increasing a companies monthly recurring costs so for many enterprises adding more bandwidth is a very expensive proposition. In addition, many utilize QoS to prioritize line of business applications, data backup, replication, database functions, citrix and lots of other network traffic due to the limitations. They are willing to keeps costs in check and build a more measured approach to controlling their costs relative to what all their application needs are. With voice and video, they are simply another application riding on top of IP and therefore should be designed and accounted for in the same way. I think Microsoft is missing the main point for the enterprise, they need to redo what they are telling partners and customers about the best strategy for deploying because they have not accounted for the fact that for many companies they don't have a WAN that has unlimited BW potential. Perhaps they could argue that no one should get a WAN and that all infrastructure should run on the Internet since getting a relatively large pipe to the Internet is cheap - there may be something to that but we don't have room to talk about that now.
Since I work for a company that is both a Cisco Premier Partner and a Microsoft Certified Partner (plus others) it is interesting seeing the shake up at Cisco about what Microsoft is doing. I think Cisco is in an interesting position of having a much more mature and stable platform but one that is modeled in many ways on a traditional voice PBX. Microsoft has really stepped out of that model and is shaking things up. They are a long way away from having the feature sets and robustness that Cisco has today but some of the features that Microsoft has out in a 1.0 product is very impressive.
Well, more thoughts later but that gets the first wave done.
- Ed
Monday, September 10, 2007
VMware ESX Server 3i - the gauntlet has been thrown down
I managed to attend Partner Day for VMware's annual conference VMworld and the announcement of ESX Server 3i is just huge. The fact they they have gotten a full hardware integrated hypervisor built out on standard Intel platforms will be a massive blow to other players out there. I think what is more remarkable is the fact that it is only 32MB in size and they have Dell, HP, IBM.
To top it all out they released Site Recovery Manager and a new release of management for VDI and a new version of ACE. While Xen is still moving forward on product and I am sure will have some interesting things to show off once the integration is done with the Citrix folks they are still behind what VMware is doing. Microsoft isn't even on the roadmap, which I think is a real shame since they have such a strong Server OS product line. It might be time for Microsoft to just buy Citrix and get it over with.
- Ed
To top it all out they released Site Recovery Manager and a new release of management for VDI and a new version of ACE. While Xen is still moving forward on product and I am sure will have some interesting things to show off once the integration is done with the Citrix folks they are still behind what VMware is doing. Microsoft isn't even on the roadmap, which I think is a real shame since they have such a strong Server OS product line. It might be time for Microsoft to just buy Citrix and get it over with.
- Ed
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)