What a week of highs and lows for Cisco. On Tuesday, it celebrated beating Wall Street’s expectations for its Q4 results, raking in earnings of $2.3 billion on $9.4 billion in sales. But as Cisco sales people celebrated Wednesday, its technical people were firefighting.
The Human (error) Network
A human error caused an electrical overload in Cisco’s San Jose data center Wednesday that left its Web site inaccessible for almost three hours. There were all sorts of comments in the blogosphere about the perils of an all-too Human Network, and whether the industry could really put much stock on Cisco’s major Data Center 3.0 strategy, which was launched amid much fanfare Networkers just a couple of weeks before .
It may be all too tempting for us to pick holes at the business continuity policy (or lack thereof) of the world’s biggest networking company, but we should also applaud it for keeping us up-to-date with three progress reports in its Platform blog, that included explanations of what Cisco said caused the site outage. Though the question of what really caused the blackout remains for some Cisco visitors.
A bunch of security alerts
It was certainly unfortunate that the outage happened on the same day that Cisco issued a slew of security alerts related to IOS, plus a response to a MeetingPlace problem that was discovered by two U.K. security researchers.
Juniper aims to lure Cisco pros with free training
Perhaps the problems could the last straw for some Cisco pros and perhaps they would be seriously tempted to take up Juniper’s offer of free training for Cisco certified folks to become Juniper certified. This is an aggressive project by the Cisco rival to drive up the numbers of folks certified on its JUNOS operating system. The offer ends December 2007.
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