General Networking

Kevin Houston's excellent blog - Blades Made Simple, has generated a fascinating "sparring match" between Cisco and HP data center gurus. This ongoing "technical duel" is being fueled by the controversial results of The Tolly Group's recent lab test that was commissioned by HP: HP BladeSystem c7000 with ProLiant BL460c G6 Servers vs Cisco UCS 5100 with B200 Servers Network Bandwidth Scalability Comparison Source:...

Twitter can be used for a bunch of useless, time killing things. Things like what a goober celebrity thinks of grooming a cat with a dog brush or the endless string of folks posting lines to songs. OK, I get it! you like Spandau Ballet (UNFOLLOW). If you follow me on Twitter, I also do my fair share (and then some) of stupid tweets. From my love affair with In N Out Burger and Popeye's Chicken to the...

Trefis is a new financial platform that lets you see how a company's products impact its stock price. According to its website: "Led by MIT engineers and former Wall Street professionals, the Trefis team builds a model for each company's stock price so that in a single snapshot, Trefis can show you the relative importance of products that comprise a company's stock price." Interestingly for Cisco,...

More than 2 months ago I blogged about Cisco's widespread and severe component supply shortages and when Cisco released its F2Q10 financial results on February 3rd, it certainly appeared Cisco had been making progress in cutting its product lead times. However, only 2 days before Cisco released its F2Q10 results, Channel Reseller News reported: "Cisco partners have complained that severe kit shortages...

Back on October 8, 2009, Cisco published again the end-of-sale and end-of life dates for its large installed base of Catalyst 6509 Chassis. Exploiting this formidable opportunity until the end of September 2010, Force10 will sell at a lower price its chassis-based C-Series C300 switch against any new Cisco 6500 Series chassis. Moreover, authorized reseller partners who generate more than $1 million...

Amazingly, it appears HP ProCurve is leveraging Cisco's worldwide army of certified engineers to its own advantage. And how is ProCurve doing that? Well, ProCurve's pitch appears quite simple: Since Cisco engineers already have the knowledge needed for networking excellence, ProCurve is leveraging that know-how and expertise by showing Cisco engineers the similarities and differences between Cisco...

This month, Cisco is celebrating its 20th anniversary as a public company. However simultaneously, Cisco co-founders Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner are being forced to payout millions in an arbitration panel’s award to David C. Soward, following an angry, bitter, lengthy and very quarrelsome business dispute between the 3 former business partners. Below, you can see that on February 22nd of this week,...

Network research firm, the Dell’Oro Group, reports that Alcatel-Lucent gained almost five percentage points of service provider edge router market share in 2009, reaching 20%, the first time in ten years that a vendor other than Juniper has occupied the No. 2 position. According to Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Activities and head of carrier portfolio strategy: "Dell Oro’s report...

Tony Bates says we're in a transformative business environment where three distinct business initiatives are culminating in what he calls a historically unprecedented experience.

Terrorist plane attacks are personal to Americans! And their especially personal to me, and why is that you may ask? Well, because during the Vietnam War I was fortunate to serve 2 years in the U.S. Army at The Pentagon and upon graduating college, I was also fortunate to work in both World Trade Center Towers. These great buildings were my personal domain and I knew them like the back of my hand....

I have said it many times before in this and other forums that I believe data center technologies are THE career path to get in right now for the future. Especially, if your background is plumbing....routin' n switchin' Read more

Network industry research firm - Infonetics, published this week its 2009 4th Quarter Service Provider Routers and Switches Forecast Report, revealing vendor market share standings for the quarter and 2009. According to Michael Howard - Infonetics co-founder and principal analyst: "The top two vendors in the service provider router space, Cisco and Juniper, together went from owning 69% of the worldwide...

Cisco celebrated its 20th anniversary as a public company this week. And what a ride it's been for Cisco shareholders. For example, in 1999, the average Cisco employee had over $250,000 in stock appreciation. Furthermore, at one point on March 27, 2000, Cisco's stock market capitalization of $569 billion made it the most valuable company on earth. Let's take a quick trip down memory lane... 1990...

Participatory medicine is a new, cooperative model for healthcare that uses social media and other tools to remove barriers between doctors and patients. Learn more from Dr. Danny Sands, a pioneer in this area, who is a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and heads clinical informatics in Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group.

Network performance vendor - Plixer International believes that Cisco's Flexible NetFlow (FNF) is the future of NetFlow technology. Continuing its role as "NetFlow's technology evangelist," Plixer developed the following tutorial on how to setup standard fields in FNF for inclusion in my ever growing collection of Cisco How-To Tutorials. However, please keep in mind that Plixer is keenly aware I lack...

During Cisco's F2Q10 earnings call last week, Cisco CEO John Chambers bragged: "We're back to record profits." The next day I blogged about Cisco's F2Q10 accounts receivable issue: "Year over year (YOY), Cisco's accounts receivable soared by $1.344 billion, an increase that was a whopping $618 million more than Cisco's net sales increase, which was just a mere $726 million." Fast-forward another 4...

According to Dual CCIE #18532 R&S/Security - George Morton: "Over the last 30 days we have seen CCIEs drop their highly coveted certifications at a much greater rate than net new CCIEs. "61 CCIEs dropped out of Cisco's prestigious certification program during the month of January 2010 alone. "For further clarification, let's do the math together: Read more

In collaboration with MSNBC.com, Crivella West Incorporated - a knowledge discovery company, digitized, analyzed and arranged this e-mail collection of former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, First Dude Todd Palin and 7 members of Palin's staff. In the following internal email dated May 7, 2007 addressed to then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (email address: govpalin@gov.state.ak.us) and First Dude Todd...

I've got to admit that I've been "kind of harsh" when blogging about Cisco CEO John Chambers lately. So thought I'd loosen up this time and blog about interesting statements made by Chambers. Racking my brain, I kept thinking about John Chambers and his duck quacking! How in the heck could I find something as interesting as that to blog about? Well, I think I've found it. Interesting statements (at...

Source: Cisco Systems It's my personal opinion, that it's always a "Red Flag" when a company's accounts receivable increases year over year (YOY) at a higher dollar amount than the (YOY) increase in a company's net sales. So that's why when Cisco reported a F2Q10 accounts receivable (YOY) increase ($1.344 billion) that was a whopping $618 million more than Cisco's (YOY) net sales increase ($726 million),...