I don't think it's meant to be a capital B. 800mbits would be truly impressive for a transfer rate. To achieve that it would have be directly fiber attached to the SAN or over 10gig ethernet. Might it replace the tape library? Over the years I've definitely developed a trust of optical media over magnetic media. Optical media is usually obvious when it's not going to work. With tape capacity stagnant along with transfer mediums in order to get any bandwidth you have to go to high level enterprise systems and of course pay enterprise dollars. This might be a solution for the smaller shops.
I agree that it's not practical for daily backups but I also think most people these days when it comes to daily are doing a disk-to-disk backup with a much smaller window. My window is 5-30 minutes depending on content.
Blue-ray "Professional" disc is in a caddy format. Nice and bulky, I first saw it and thought "retro!"
Then I realized how crappy it is to store video on blue-ray for production purposes. It takes so long to get the video off of it that it's pointless.
My last event produced over 100 blue-ray discs at 25gig each that's not really that much video. It's taken over a week to get it onto the SAN where it is actually useful. 1TB blue-ray might be more worthwhile, we'll see when it comes out.
Given the state of ATI drivers on Vista I gotta disagree with you. They don't seem to be having the same troubles getting it to work on Vista.
The DRM is not being forced down their throats, if they don't support it then they won't be able to display DRM protected media plain and simple. The presence of DRM support in Vista has always been way overblown as it only matters when the media you're playing requires it. My home DVDs play just fine.
I'll say that the blame does belong with Microsoft but also with third parties. Microsoft is to blame for creating an OS that allows these kinds of problems but every OS with device drivers which is all operating systems has the same issue with bad drivers. Lord knows I've encountered this in the Debian world, I recently built a router box with a solid state hard drive, the installer can't write an MBR for it because it thinks there are too many cylinders. CentOS strangely enough installs just fine.
I also remember when drivers for Windows 2000 were in rough shape and that smoothed out over time. XP added some additional headaches which also smoothed out over time. I see no reason Vista wouldn't have better drivers over the next couple of years.
Driver compatibility will come with time as people like Nvidia get their act together.
Streamlining Vista can already be done though, it doesn't have to take a lot of resources unless you want all the eye candy and the resources. I think you still have a valid point, with all the work that went into it you would think it would work faster. Personally I don't notice any lag, but I'm running on new hardware.
It remains to be seen what Windows 7 will offer that will redeem it. The vast majority of people see no reason to go to Vista and as a home user I understand their feelings. As a sysadmin though I understand why Vista is the way it is and how it's desirable for a corporate environment.
It's the same basic issue that developed when the 9x line died and everything moved to NT. We can all agree that the NT model is far superior to the old real-mode model. The problem is that you have a business optimized OS being pushed on home users, in an attempt to make the home users happier you screw the business users and you end up with Vista where no one is happy.
Of course if the whole thing was more modular then it would be less of an issue. Then Microsoft would be doing what the Unix world has been doing for 40 years and what Apple caught on to a few years ago.
Big companies take a long time to adapt though, look how long it took IBM to recover from a failing business model, almost 10 years. I think Windows 7 will be Microsoft's wake-up call if Vista isn't already. Execs have a habit of being hard-headed about stupid things though so I wouldn't be surprised if that was holding things up.
A valid issue is that rarely is a new OS pushed down IT's throat. In my limited experience IT evaluates ahead of time, decides whether the risks outweigh the benefits and proceed accordingly.
Sysadmin does apply to servers but it also applies broadly to desktops, you're not going to fix that printer issue or help with an Excel problem but you would be responsible for pushing software out and patching. Not all businesses perform in this way though as many don't have central software distribution.
Personally I don't know why Vista would scare a sysadmin except that there is a lot of learning that needs to happen. A sysadmin shouldn't be afraid to learn a new system in my mind though. Vista in many ways is designed to give IT more control over the end-user thus allowing us to lock it down while keeping workers productive. That's the idea at least. The few Vista machines I've deployed here work fine thus far although it's mostly limited to IT as I'm getting my whole staff familiar and making sure all out software works with it. So far it's all good.
We agree though, leaving system administration over Vista is not a bright move. I know personally I enjoy both the Linux world and the Windows world and use both as I see necessary. My Oracle boxes run Linux, my application servers run Windows/IIS, my phone server runs Linux, thank you Trixbox!
The world is getting more interesting now that a lot of this stuff plays better together.
No tornadoes but the occasional sandstorm, the wind is rarely enough that you'd have to shut a turbine down.
I think you're right in that the winner will be a combination of technology. Solar works great out here as the majority of days we can produce power.
I wasn't disagreeing with anything you were saying, merely that I envy those with clouds. The sunny days here make you feel like you're in the Truman show. Gets a little boring when you've had 100 straight days of sunny and warm. We recently had a three day break with a little rain, it was much appreciated.
You have clouds in your sky? Must be nice, here in AZ the vast majority of our days are quite clear. Of course we have no tidal forces we can take advantage of.
I think you are very confused what they mean when they say $15/gig, that includes redundant load balanced raid controllers, the power required to run it all, any internal switching connected such as Infiniband, 10GigE, or FCP interfaces.
When you add all this up then yes, a 60tb SAN array is not going to cost the price of 60 1tb Hard drives.
Enterprise class storage with all the associated equipment does not come cheap even today.When your goal isn't just bulk capacity then you have to also consider the number of spindles necesary to get the best speed then things get complicated and the cost/gig rises quickly.
Hey I don't mind, a lot of those Californians brought them bandwidth which we get to enjoy. I have servers at two facilities here in AZ and really all the bandwidth available to me that I can shake a stick at.
In most areas he is talking about living in town which is specified by a certain number of buildings within a certain distance of each other. The government hands our billions in subsidies to the big providers to provide you with essential services.
You are correct that in some circumstances you do have to pay for all of that work if you live far enough out but you don't usually have to pay the full cost unless you're really far out and it would only benefit you. It all depends on how the land is zoned.
I originally ran my 500mhz Athlon as well, after a few years the fan stopped working and I never noticed until a friend had a 650mhz that he wasn't using anymore and gave it to me. I used that 650 until last year and it still works great!
Fair enough, I just don't think most people have thought out white-lists very well. Unless you're going to employ more IT staff to maintain a list of approved apps then your business is screwed because you can't adapt fast enough when someone needs new software.
Maybe most other companies are more static than the company I work for and it's easier for them. I don't see how it would work here as we have workers which change roles at different times requiring different software, and occasionally they find a piece of software which dramatically helps them do their job. Course I'm just one guy here so maybe with two we could keep up with things like that.
Given that my AV software filters on the order of a million emails a day I can say that it catches a lot, and thats just what gets through the hardware firewall which is also scanning inbound and outbound email.
Do you seriously think AV software never catches anything? The Better Business Bureau emails were a good example as they had a PDF attached inside a Word doc. The contents were impossible to scan until the user actually opened it up and then we see it's a trojan downloader, too bad it didn't work both because Office was patched and because the AV stopped it from running in the first place.
I see first hand lots of evidence, I haven't had a machine taken down by a virus in years because I filter at all points of entry and exit so I know when a machine is compromised. I rarely look at the logs on outbound anymore though since its been so long.
So in short, about 30 seconds ago an AV software caught a virus, course my AV software also filters spam at an exceptional rate. False positives are a rarity and so is spam in the inbox. The closest it gets to my users is the junk e-mail folder.
If you're working for an organization of computers though, particularly one marketing oriented how in the world could you maintain any sort of white-list?
In the Windows world it's fairly easily management on a broad scale with mandatory profiles and a login/logout script which writes to a database.
Of course you can do the same thing on a broad scale with most Linux distros out there.
White-listing the web or email is simply not possible for a lot of companies though.
You're right, security is a process and in my mind should be a process. You never rely on a single means of protection and that includes hardware firewalls which if Pix is the example can definitely be exploited as well.
You have this on all platforms with Microsoft's Systems Management server now called System Center Configuration Manager 2007 can centrally update software from third party vendors as well as update Microsoft software. There are clients for OS X, there are clients for a few different distros for Linux, clients for PDAs and smart phones. You can distribute your packages to alleviate bandwidth problems and eliminate single points of failure.
I'll add that there are several other tools out there, even an open source one or two that accomplish the same thing although I haven't seen too many that are as supported.
SMS or SCCM now also keeps an inventory of what's installed on the computer. Agents can be trained to look for custom software as well so everything you've listed is already available elsewhere and has been around for quite a while actually. SMS 2 had the majority of the functionality you describe and that was in the NT4 days.
Do you think the only way the U.S. can organize it's troops is through GPS? Do you think that missiles rely solely on GPS for guidance? You can't possibly think that.
Your perceived vulnerability is completely non-existent. GPS merely augments our ability to fight along with a lot of other technologies. You never rely on a single point of failure and the military practices better than most.
You see nothing inherently criminal in a woman who is in her late 40s using knowledge of her neighbor with a known history of depression and a previous suicide attempt who is 13?
She pretended to be a 13 year old boy to build up the 13 year old girl and then while in character proceeded to say how much she as the 13 year old boy liked the girl and thought she was attractive and wanted to meet. After all that build up just come out and literally say that she's not attractive and that the world would be better off without her?
If it was another 13 year old kid doing this you would have a point but this is an adult who clearly understood the implications of the game she was playing. The only problem is that the contempt she held for the neighbor because of a teenage slight against her daughter made her blind to the possibility that the girl would actually go through with it.
I'll agree there is no specific law about this but you can't say that the life was lost because of the actions of the thirteen year old girl alone. You don't know that should would have killed herself without encouragement. Let us not forget that suicide is itself a crime and the 40+ woman was clearly an accessory to it. In that context conspiracy sure makes sense to me, perhaps you can shed some additional light on why you have a hard time believing it?
I hate to say it but a lot of states limit the size knife you're allowed to own for this very reason. This is why swords usually have to be dull. One could easily interpret this for broadband speed and limit the available bandwidth.
Personally I haven't noticed this slowdown on Cox. I routinely download at my rated speed or even slightly above. For this reason everytime there is a large download I usually look for a torrent first to get it. The latest Debian DVD iso only took me about 25 minutes to download, maybe closer to the 30 minutes but that's pretty darned fast.
I don't think speed should be limited, I'm paying for Internet access, I'm not paying for certain kinds of access for certain kinds of applications. If that's the case they will have to list out what they are restricting. Fortunately Cox here in Phoenix is not starved for bandwidth so I don't imagine we'll see the issues here anytime soon.
I remember it, of course I was in Vermont at the time. Also, if one power plant goes down the whole area almost never loses power. How many nuclear power plants are only one reactor? By the time the ants took one down they be responding to keep the other three and the whole area would be fine.
Of course here in AZ at least power comes from several different sources albeit primarily from Palo Verde.
I'll grant the higher up you go the more the Cisco route makes sense. As for IO capability you can achieve much higher than 8gbit when you start talking about infiniband you start to approach 40gbit pretty quick. The problem the higher up you go is that you have to cobble together more and more equipment so it makes perfect sense on the low end where a single computer is quite sufficient, or rather a pair of computers to achieve redundancy. That alone would give you five 9s without a problem. It scales out pretty easily too.
You seriously think you can't do QoS or have IPS/IDS all at the same time on a Linux box? Seriously? You think it doesn't scale? Honestly, Cisco got to where it is today because there was no alternative before. Now there is real competition from all over the place and Cisco's offerings are anything but leading the industry. They always take an idea, we'll use OSPF for example and make a proprietary protocol which I will grant is a little more efficient but it is indeed proprietary and locks customers into using Cisco.
If you really think 10 servers on two switches can't meet or beat any of Cisco's routers then you're in for a world of surprise as Cisco becomes increasingly pointless.
I'll also add that I've had 10 years in the real world, 5 of them were using Cisco products, the last 5 years has been spent migrating away and the world is much much simpler and far more reliable, I'll also add quite a bit faster.
I was wondering about this, I've had bad luck with the Proxim access points. They seem to just die after so long of use, but I use them in some pretty tough mobile scenarios. I've been looking at Cisco wireless for a while, my scenario would have me deploying probably 30 to 40 access points at a moment notice so there is some appeal to the Cisco approach with light weight access points. I don't really like all the extra gear they make you buy though, especially if you plan on integrating RFIDs into the mix.
I see you didn't mention Call Manager with Cisco VOIP. Software updates causing random breaks. CM requires a complete regression test before you can deploy it, especially if you have 3rd party tools. If someone doesn't work right you have a 50/50 shot at getting a good Cisco tech to help you.
I've run into a lot of hardware related issues with my Cisco equipment, so much so that it mostly all got replaced with HP switching gear. Right now an HP switch does all the routing at each site but my Zebra setup is holding rather nicely so I'm going to offload all the routing as my next project.
SONET, DS3, and DSUs in any quantity can be purchased for a computer without a problem. When you get into the terabit range you still have a lot of options.
For switching Cisco makes zero sense, HP gives you higher through-put for less money and they aren't the only ones. Let the router do the routing and the switch can do the switching.
The only reason Layer 3 and 4 switches are becoming commonplace is because routers get more and more expensive the higher up the stack you go. There is nothing worse than using a wire-speed layer 3 switch which is undergoing a heavy load from file transfers as a central routing gateway. Especially when you get into BGP and OSPF.
Terabit backplanes are nothing new though, easily achieved through distributed computing and for far less money.
It's worth noting you can do everything a Cisco router can do with a Linux box. I just built a box with Zebra and a solid state hard drve along with a 4 port network card. I have some pretty good throughput with that and I would have no trouble adding additional cards for connections to OC48s and higher.
Cisco is becoming increasingly irrelevant. They don't bring anything to the table that isn't already out there and they segment it all so it's a lot harder to manage than it needs to be.
Anyone else notice a sharp decline in the quality of Cisco products over the last 5 years?
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I agree that it's not practical for daily backups but I also think most people these days when it comes to daily are doing a disk-to-disk backup with a much smaller window. My window is 5-30 minutes depending on content.
Blue-ray "Professional" disc is in a caddy format. Nice and bulky, I first saw it and thought "retro!"
Then I realized how crappy it is to store video on blue-ray for production purposes. It takes so long to get the video off of it that it's pointless.
My last event produced over 100 blue-ray discs at 25gig each that's not really that much video. It's taken over a week to get it onto the SAN where it is actually useful. 1TB blue-ray might be more worthwhile, we'll see when it comes out.
Given the state of ATI drivers on Vista I gotta disagree with you. They don't seem to be having the same troubles getting it to work on Vista.
The DRM is not being forced down their throats, if they don't support it then they won't be able to display DRM protected media plain and simple. The presence of DRM support in Vista has always been way overblown as it only matters when the media you're playing requires it. My home DVDs play just fine.
I'll say that the blame does belong with Microsoft but also with third parties. Microsoft is to blame for creating an OS that allows these kinds of problems but every OS with device drivers which is all operating systems has the same issue with bad drivers. Lord knows I've encountered this in the Debian world, I recently built a router box with a solid state hard drive, the installer can't write an MBR for it because it thinks there are too many cylinders. CentOS strangely enough installs just fine.
I also remember when drivers for Windows 2000 were in rough shape and that smoothed out over time. XP added some additional headaches which also smoothed out over time. I see no reason Vista wouldn't have better drivers over the next couple of years.
Driver compatibility will come with time as people like Nvidia get their act together.
Streamlining Vista can already be done though, it doesn't have to take a lot of resources unless you want all the eye candy and the resources. I think you still have a valid point, with all the work that went into it you would think it would work faster. Personally I don't notice any lag, but I'm running on new hardware.
It remains to be seen what Windows 7 will offer that will redeem it. The vast majority of people see no reason to go to Vista and as a home user I understand their feelings. As a sysadmin though I understand why Vista is the way it is and how it's desirable for a corporate environment.
It's the same basic issue that developed when the 9x line died and everything moved to NT. We can all agree that the NT model is far superior to the old real-mode model. The problem is that you have a business optimized OS being pushed on home users, in an attempt to make the home users happier you screw the business users and you end up with Vista where no one is happy.
Of course if the whole thing was more modular then it would be less of an issue. Then Microsoft would be doing what the Unix world has been doing for 40 years and what Apple caught on to a few years ago.
Big companies take a long time to adapt though, look how long it took IBM to recover from a failing business model, almost 10 years. I think Windows 7 will be Microsoft's wake-up call if Vista isn't already. Execs have a habit of being hard-headed about stupid things though so I wouldn't be surprised if that was holding things up.
A valid issue is that rarely is a new OS pushed down IT's throat. In my limited experience IT evaluates ahead of time, decides whether the risks outweigh the benefits and proceed accordingly.
Sysadmin does apply to servers but it also applies broadly to desktops, you're not going to fix that printer issue or help with an Excel problem but you would be responsible for pushing software out and patching. Not all businesses perform in this way though as many don't have central software distribution.
Personally I don't know why Vista would scare a sysadmin except that there is a lot of learning that needs to happen. A sysadmin shouldn't be afraid to learn a new system in my mind though. Vista in many ways is designed to give IT more control over the end-user thus allowing us to lock it down while keeping workers productive. That's the idea at least. The few Vista machines I've deployed here work fine thus far although it's mostly limited to IT as I'm getting my whole staff familiar and making sure all out software works with it. So far it's all good.
We agree though, leaving system administration over Vista is not a bright move. I know personally I enjoy both the Linux world and the Windows world and use both as I see necessary. My Oracle boxes run Linux, my application servers run Windows/IIS, my phone server runs Linux, thank you Trixbox!
The world is getting more interesting now that a lot of this stuff plays better together.
No tornadoes but the occasional sandstorm, the wind is rarely enough that you'd have to shut a turbine down.
I think you're right in that the winner will be a combination of technology. Solar works great out here as the majority of days we can produce power.
I wasn't disagreeing with anything you were saying, merely that I envy those with clouds. The sunny days here make you feel like you're in the Truman show. Gets a little boring when you've had 100 straight days of sunny and warm. We recently had a three day break with a little rain, it was much appreciated.
You have clouds in your sky? Must be nice, here in AZ the vast majority of our days are quite clear. Of course we have no tidal forces we can take advantage of.
I think you are very confused what they mean when they say $15/gig, that includes redundant load balanced raid controllers, the power required to run it all, any internal switching connected such as Infiniband, 10GigE, or FCP interfaces.
When you add all this up then yes, a 60tb SAN array is not going to cost the price of 60 1tb Hard drives.
Enterprise class storage with all the associated equipment does not come cheap even today.When your goal isn't just bulk capacity then you have to also consider the number of spindles necesary to get the best speed then things get complicated and the cost/gig rises quickly.
Hey I don't mind, a lot of those Californians brought them bandwidth which we get to enjoy. I have servers at two facilities here in AZ and really all the bandwidth available to me that I can shake a stick at.
In most areas he is talking about living in town which is specified by a certain number of buildings within a certain distance of each other. The government hands our billions in subsidies to the big providers to provide you with essential services.
You are correct that in some circumstances you do have to pay for all of that work if you live far enough out but you don't usually have to pay the full cost unless you're really far out and it would only benefit you. It all depends on how the land is zoned.
I originally ran my 500mhz Athlon as well, after a few years the fan stopped working and I never noticed until a friend had a 650mhz that he wasn't using anymore and gave it to me. I used that 650 until last year and it still works great!
Fair enough, I just don't think most people have thought out white-lists very well. Unless you're going to employ more IT staff to maintain a list of approved apps then your business is screwed because you can't adapt fast enough when someone needs new software.
Maybe most other companies are more static than the company I work for and it's easier for them. I don't see how it would work here as we have workers which change roles at different times requiring different software, and occasionally they find a piece of software which dramatically helps them do their job. Course I'm just one guy here so maybe with two we could keep up with things like that.
Given that my AV software filters on the order of a million emails a day I can say that it catches a lot, and thats just what gets through the hardware firewall which is also scanning inbound and outbound email.
Do you seriously think AV software never catches anything? The Better Business Bureau emails were a good example as they had a PDF attached inside a Word doc. The contents were impossible to scan until the user actually opened it up and then we see it's a trojan downloader, too bad it didn't work both because Office was patched and because the AV stopped it from running in the first place.
I see first hand lots of evidence, I haven't had a machine taken down by a virus in years because I filter at all points of entry and exit so I know when a machine is compromised. I rarely look at the logs on outbound anymore though since its been so long.
So in short, about 30 seconds ago an AV software caught a virus, course my AV software also filters spam at an exceptional rate. False positives are a rarity and so is spam in the inbox. The closest it gets to my users is the junk e-mail folder.
If you're working for an organization of computers though, particularly one marketing oriented how in the world could you maintain any sort of white-list?
In the Windows world it's fairly easily management on a broad scale with mandatory profiles and a login/logout script which writes to a database.
Of course you can do the same thing on a broad scale with most Linux distros out there.
White-listing the web or email is simply not possible for a lot of companies though.
You're right, security is a process and in my mind should be a process. You never rely on a single means of protection and that includes hardware firewalls which if Pix is the example can definitely be exploited as well.
You have this on all platforms with Microsoft's Systems Management server now called System Center Configuration Manager 2007 can centrally update software from third party vendors as well as update Microsoft software. There are clients for OS X, there are clients for a few different distros for Linux, clients for PDAs and smart phones. You can distribute your packages to alleviate bandwidth problems and eliminate single points of failure.
I'll add that there are several other tools out there, even an open source one or two that accomplish the same thing although I haven't seen too many that are as supported.
SMS or SCCM now also keeps an inventory of what's installed on the computer. Agents can be trained to look for custom software as well so everything you've listed is already available elsewhere and has been around for quite a while actually. SMS 2 had the majority of the functionality you describe and that was in the NT4 days.
Do you think the only way the U.S. can organize it's troops is through GPS? Do you think that missiles rely solely on GPS for guidance? You can't possibly think that.
Your perceived vulnerability is completely non-existent. GPS merely augments our ability to fight along with a lot of other technologies. You never rely on a single point of failure and the military practices better than most.
You see nothing inherently criminal in a woman who is in her late 40s using knowledge of her neighbor with a known history of depression and a previous suicide attempt who is 13?
She pretended to be a 13 year old boy to build up the 13 year old girl and then while in character proceeded to say how much she as the 13 year old boy liked the girl and thought she was attractive and wanted to meet. After all that build up just come out and literally say that she's not attractive and that the world would be better off without her?
If it was another 13 year old kid doing this you would have a point but this is an adult who clearly understood the implications of the game she was playing. The only problem is that the contempt she held for the neighbor because of a teenage slight against her daughter made her blind to the possibility that the girl would actually go through with it.
I'll agree there is no specific law about this but you can't say that the life was lost because of the actions of the thirteen year old girl alone. You don't know that should would have killed herself without encouragement. Let us not forget that suicide is itself a crime and the 40+ woman was clearly an accessory to it. In that context conspiracy sure makes sense to me, perhaps you can shed some additional light on why you have a hard time believing it?
I hate to say it but a lot of states limit the size knife you're allowed to own for this very reason. This is why swords usually have to be dull. One could easily interpret this for broadband speed and limit the available bandwidth.
Personally I haven't noticed this slowdown on Cox. I routinely download at my rated speed or even slightly above. For this reason everytime there is a large download I usually look for a torrent first to get it. The latest Debian DVD iso only took me about 25 minutes to download, maybe closer to the 30 minutes but that's pretty darned fast.
I don't think speed should be limited, I'm paying for Internet access, I'm not paying for certain kinds of access for certain kinds of applications. If that's the case they will have to list out what they are restricting. Fortunately Cox here in Phoenix is not starved for bandwidth so I don't imagine we'll see the issues here anytime soon.
I remember it, of course I was in Vermont at the time. Also, if one power plant goes down the whole area almost never loses power. How many nuclear power plants are only one reactor? By the time the ants took one down they be responding to keep the other three and the whole area would be fine.
Of course here in AZ at least power comes from several different sources albeit primarily from Palo Verde.
I'll grant the higher up you go the more the Cisco route makes sense. As for IO capability you can achieve much higher than 8gbit when you start talking about infiniband you start to approach 40gbit pretty quick. The problem the higher up you go is that you have to cobble together more and more equipment so it makes perfect sense on the low end where a single computer is quite sufficient, or rather a pair of computers to achieve redundancy. That alone would give you five 9s without a problem. It scales out pretty easily too.
You seriously think you can't do QoS or have IPS/IDS all at the same time on a Linux box? Seriously? You think it doesn't scale? Honestly, Cisco got to where it is today because there was no alternative before. Now there is real competition from all over the place and Cisco's offerings are anything but leading the industry. They always take an idea, we'll use OSPF for example and make a proprietary protocol which I will grant is a little more efficient but it is indeed proprietary and locks customers into using Cisco.
If you really think 10 servers on two switches can't meet or beat any of Cisco's routers then you're in for a world of surprise as Cisco becomes increasingly pointless.
I'll also add that I've had 10 years in the real world, 5 of them were using Cisco products, the last 5 years has been spent migrating away and the world is much much simpler and far more reliable, I'll also add quite a bit faster.
I was wondering about this, I've had bad luck with the Proxim access points. They seem to just die after so long of use, but I use them in some pretty tough mobile scenarios. I've been looking at Cisco wireless for a while, my scenario would have me deploying probably 30 to 40 access points at a moment notice so there is some appeal to the Cisco approach with light weight access points. I don't really like all the extra gear they make you buy though, especially if you plan on integrating RFIDs into the mix.
I see you didn't mention Call Manager with Cisco VOIP. Software updates causing random breaks. CM requires a complete regression test before you can deploy it, especially if you have 3rd party tools. If someone doesn't work right you have a 50/50 shot at getting a good Cisco tech to help you.
I've run into a lot of hardware related issues with my Cisco equipment, so much so that it mostly all got replaced with HP switching gear. Right now an HP switch does all the routing at each site but my Zebra setup is holding rather nicely so I'm going to offload all the routing as my next project.
SONET, DS3, and DSUs in any quantity can be purchased for a computer without a problem. When you get into the terabit range you still have a lot of options.
For switching Cisco makes zero sense, HP gives you higher through-put for less money and they aren't the only ones. Let the router do the routing and the switch can do the switching.
The only reason Layer 3 and 4 switches are becoming commonplace is because routers get more and more expensive the higher up the stack you go. There is nothing worse than using a wire-speed layer 3 switch which is undergoing a heavy load from file transfers as a central routing gateway. Especially when you get into BGP and OSPF.
Terabit backplanes are nothing new though, easily achieved through distributed computing and for far less money.
It's worth noting you can do everything a Cisco router can do with a Linux box. I just built a box with Zebra and a solid state hard drve along with a 4 port network card. I have some pretty good throughput with that and I would have no trouble adding additional cards for connections to OC48s and higher.
Cisco is becoming increasingly irrelevant. They don't bring anything to the table that isn't already out there and they segment it all so it's a lot harder to manage than it needs to be.
Anyone else notice a sharp decline in the quality of Cisco products over the last 5 years?