* Posts by Simon

11 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007

Cisco's uncharted territory: Here be storage dragons

Simon

iSCSI aintn't dead yet

Don't be so quick to dismiss iSCSI, there's been a resurgence of it driven by VMware's inbuilt support, and 10 gig Ethernet changes the game somewhat. When Equallogic and their ilk finally have 10 gig controllers shipping and solid state drive support the performance will give the big boys a run for their money. Totally agree that I could do all the same stuff on a Sun Thumper box, and more besides (NFS/CIFS), but the next couple of years will be interesting.

Airbus A380 bows out of Air Force One competition

Simon

Runways

Yes and the terminal requirements are somewhat moot for Air Force 1 too - it always parks well away from public terminals for safety reasons. It's immense size might have reduced the tendency to take a fleet of planes on big trips these days.

Boffin brings 'write once, run anywhere' to Cisco hijacks

Simon

End of support comes fast too

There's a hell of a lot of routers out there more than 4 years old, which means they'll never get updates coded for fix new vulnerabilities. Cisco have got complacent and assume it will force people to upgrade to their own newer products, but once you're upgrading other vendors offerings look mighty attractive, cheaper, and even free in the case of Quagga and the like - especially for Ethernet to Ethernet routing.

Totally agree with everyone else on the QA front - people stick with an IOS that works for years and years rather than discovering the latest bugs, recent code for the supposedly top of the line 6500 has been especially poor.

iSCSI: Game over

Simon

errr iSCSI over 10 gig works just fine

We've been running iSCSI on 10 gig since late 2006, works great. We have a separate 10 gig access layer which is iSCSI only, we have no measurable packet loss, so I really don't get this whole DCE thing - the whole beauty of Ethernet is that it's simple and inexpensive. It seems like a play by the major vendors to introduce a load more complexity to the network - purely to prevent 10 gig Ethernet from becoming the commodity that gig E has become.

ePassport tests put biometrics through their paces

Simon

10 years is a long time

The biggest issue with RFID's in this application is that it takes a couple of years to define a standard then that standard of encryption has to hold up for at least 10 years. This is a VERY long time in Moore's Law terms, even if sensible algorithms are chosen, there are limits to what can be done on an RFID for reasonable cost. By the tail end of these passports validity people are going to be screaming about how easy to hack they are.

Western Digital's 2.5-inch to hit 1TB by early 2010

Simon

Where is Hitachi ?

Where is Hitachi in the race? They seem to be concentrating on 7200RPM drives, but have a 320 out in volume, so a 500 can't be far off at least in announcement.

I finally got a 320GB 7200 into my laptop too.

Maritz apologises to VMware customers again

Simon

Agree with Goat Jam

Now ESXi is free - the basic Hypervisor, there is no reason to have this complex licensing model for the hypervisor AT ALL. Why not do away with all that and only enforce licensing on Virtual Center and other non-core hypervisor funtions?

Phishers clean up at online casinos

Simon

Phishing yes, money laundering no

Online gambling sites are a horrible way to launder money - the sites take a rake plus have sophisticated logging and anti-fraud tools, so it's expensive and there's a risk of having your entire deposit confiscated for good.

Juniper jumps into Ethernet switch game

Simon

Sooo expensive

Nice to see they've gone for Cisco style reassuringly expensive pricing plus a load of security features that will be a support nightmare if implemented.

Per port costs for 10 gig should be going down not up - what are Cisco and Juniper thinking?

Vista sets 2007 land-speed record for copying and deleting

Simon

Not the only MS OS with copy issues

XP 64 has a nice one where it blue screens with an error in NTFS.sys if you try to copy a > 4GB file and the source and destination volumes are the same. It seems like the more headcount MS add, the poorer their quality gets...

Girls' school head condemns bubblewrapping of kids

Simon

Totally agree

Playing is all about getting hurt, in order to learn your limits. Humans need a certain amount of risk and will adjust their actions to get it - put seatbelts in cars and people drive faster, have 'safe' surfaces in playgrounds and kids hurt themselves more seriously, though there are fewer minor scrapes.