Are Cisco switches really so expensive?; Survey: ITIL’s ROI hard to measure; Content filtering to protect intellectual property; Broadband router throughput
Are they worth it?
Regarding “Are Cisco switches really so expensive?”: Classic pandering to Cisco. The argument that says the relatively high availability of Cisco skills in the marketplace reduces total cost of ownership is as false as “you never get fired for buying Cisco.” Manufacturers who didn’t build their product lines by hundreds of acquisitions have few OS/CLI variations, if any, and therefore training is absolutely minimal. You also gain the benefit of simpler AMCs and less upgrades, memory adds, and so on.
Will Bell
London
ITIL do
Regarding “Survey: ITIL’s ROI hard to measure”: I find this article kind of ironic. ITIL has good principles and excellent merit, but ITIL cannot be done effectively without baselining and effective machine-to-personnel transitions of information. In effect, if you do not have good correlation, incident management becomes a wash. And if your correlation is not customizable, you are now stuck with some vendors idea of how you should respond to given incidents.
Douglas Stevenson
Austin, Texas
Lock up your data
Regarding “Content filtering to protect intellectual property”: What is the matter with these people? If you have very sensitive data, why are you keeping it on a connected or accessible computer? Keep this stuff in a vault just like a bank does. Why do you think banks have vaults — for the fun of it? No, it’s for security. Computers are like a colander — they have holes (ports) all over them. Keep your secure information locked up.
Robert Bryant
President and CEO
Atomic Systems
Exton, Pa.
Broadband router realities
I enjoyed Kevin Tolly’s column on broadband router throughput and found it, unfortunately, quite true to my own experiences. Reliability might make a good topic for a future column. I have used Linksys for my home office for many years and have scrupulously kept my firmware up to date. Unfortunately, either the hardware or the firmware has a problem Linksys does not acknowledge and will not do anything about. Fairly frequently (once or twice a day sometimes), I need to power-cycle the router to get an Internet connection through my cable modem. For whatever reason, the router just hangs up. Linksys support has sent me revised setup instructions for Comcast cable installations and I have gone through the pain of resetting all the parameters and port configurations, but it didn’t help. I even keep the router away from equipment generating heat just in case.
At home this is an inconvenience, but when I try to access my home systems remotely via GoToMyPC or Slingbox, it’s just impossible. I’m now looking into routers that can handle multiple WAN connections. Hopefully their reliability record is better.
Steve Markman
CEO and technology consultant
Venture High Consulting LLC
Los Gatos, Calif.
Thanks to Kevin Tolly for shining some light on the issue of broadband router performance. I had the interesting experience last year of removing my router and operating directly attached to my cable modem. The performance was spectacular — about 10 times faster without the router box slowing things down.
Tolly didn’t address the latency issue; I hate to think how much the router delays the packets. I also suspect (but can’t prove) that my router, a cheap Linksys box, has a memory leak and slowly degrades over a three-to-four-day period. I’m now in the habit of power-cycling the router every few days. I’d be interested to read Tolly’s opinion, or even a full Network World test, of the better broadband routers and how much you have to pay to get decent performance.
Peter Thornton
Annapolis, Md.
Regarding broadband routers, here’s another perspective. I’ve had DSL at home since 1999 and had an ancient Alcatel 1000 DSL modem terminating my DSL line. Although the line was rated 1.5Mbs, I never saw throughput better than 700Kbs on it. After communicating with a tech on the DSL forums, I installed a newer DSL modem on the line, configured it and am now getting a consistent 1.25Mbps connection. That’s a 500Kbps increase for $20 spent on a second-hand unit from eBay, but the right unit.
It’s not just the router, but all the components in the system that come together to limit or maximize throughput. I swapped out my old SonicWall firewall when I replaced my modem. While it was rated to handle more than that rate of traffic, it was time to step up to something a little more robust and flexible. I put in a Cisco PIX 501 to get both more headroom and a decent VPN. Again, not expensive, but not a Sunday ad special, either.
Matthew Leeds
Vice president of operations
Gracenote
Emeryville, Calif.
