TechVirtuoso

Not everything made by Cisco is made of gold

0 Comments March 8, 2010 : By Jake Sonelly · Category : Featured, IT Technology, Review

The scenario:  You’ve found yourself working at a company that is experiencing phenomenal growth.  The employees have actually decupled in the past year and show no signs of slowing in the near future (on this note, when was the last time you saw the “decupled” in print?). You have inherited a network that is truly a Frankensteinian creation that not even the original architects understand any more.  You have noticed that you neither have a working firewall nor a decent VPN system, though Cisco VPN is used by a handful of key employees to connect to a Cisco 1800 series router.  The IP scheme for the organization, which spans three sites, is using the 192.x.x.x address space. You wish to straighten everything out with a minimum of downtime and as seamless as possible for the end-users.  What do you do?

Well, instead of telling you what to do, allow me to tell you what not to do.  Not just that, let me drill into your collective skulls what not to do.  Are you ready?  Here it comes:

Do not, and this is key, so write it down… do not buy a Cisco SA 500 series device.

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Qwest rolling out new fiber for cellular providers

0 Comments September 18, 2009 : By Michael Stanclift · Category : News

quest_logoQwest Communications has announced the launch of its new fiber-based, Ethernet backhaul service designed for wireless service providers, allowing providers to run fiber directly to cellular tower sites to accommodate for increasing bandwidth demands being places on them by more advanced smartphones, netbooks and other bandwidth-demanding systems.

“Wireless users seem to have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth, whether they’re watching videos, sending pictures to friends, playing games online – you name it,” said Roland Thorton, executive vice president for Qwest Wholesale.

Qwest says this new infrastructure is ideal for providers looking to migrate from existing SONET based services due to greater flexibility.

The new service will allow scalable bandwidth, enabling providers to increase capacity to sites on an incremental and as-needed basis. The bandwidth is managed by software, rather than hardware so the time required to perform provisioning of increased speed is reduced and operations are simplified.