Am making a spreadsheet comparing different products and looking at longer term costs, maintenance, power, cooling, and such.  I felt that rather than scrubbing the DOE sites and trying to get power costs by state I would just use the national average, but then fell flat on that because I found negotiated rates could be ...

In March 1999 Scott Bradner from Harvard University and Jim McQuaid of NetScout got together and published RFC 2544 – "Benchmarking Methodology."  In the subsequent eleven years this informational RFC has been used to provide a baseline for testing many networking devices.  It is designed to provide consistency between vendors so an end-customer can make ...

Sometimes the ‘golden handcuffs’ tarnish the other hands in the company… Thirteen years ago I worked at a small technology consulting firm, headquartered out of Columbia South Carolina, named The Computer Group.  TCG was acquired by IKON Office Solutions, the copier company. IKON then went on a spending spree over the next year acquiring many ...

I am still a very proud alumnus of Cisco Systems, but am also not bashful about areas I think the networking behemoth can improve.  My primary recommendation would be to get the business units working together to consistently solve customer problems – be a big company, but act like one company, as opposed to the ...

It all started when I wanted  some new network icons.  Somehow all the ones I used in the past were made by an art department I strangely do not have access to anymore, and I really don’t want to have to pay an agency to make them for me.  I could probably outsource somewhere, but ...

People have been asking me for a while what the next ‘shot’ would be in the tech titan border-clash.  Cisco entered the server market with UCS, and everyone was wondering what the response would be. I didn’t think 3Com would be taken off the market this quickly, I figured everyone would wait a year or ...