Network Design Blog, Network Installation Blog, Network Support Blog - Infinity Network Solutions Blog

x8yvdasbg6

I wanted to take a moment on this holiday to say thank you to those that we are celebrating today.  We owe this day and our lives of freedom and comfort to the men and women that serve and have served our country by putting themselves in harm’s way at home and overseas.  We also owe a debt of gratitude to the families of those brave men and women.  So as we spend the day with our friends and family remember to thank those that have helped make this possible.

3Com hopes that the addition of a new name will help them become a major player in the enterprise networking space again.  With the US debut of H3C; once a joint venture between 3Com and Huawei of China which is now owned by 3Com; 3Com now has some major switch and router products geared at the large enterprise.  These new products were announced a few weeks ago, but the first major push appears to have happened at this year’s InterOp.  3Com had a major space and a new red color scheme for their InterOp booth which showed off many new products.  While some of them are not quite ready for the USA (IP Surveillance being one), most were products that you can get very soon.  The major item on display was the new S12500 which based on specs has twice the density, the performance, and half the power consumption as the Cisco Nexus 7000 at up to 30% less expensive.  If this is true then there might something to consider when building out your next datacenter.  3Com also was showing off the S5800 a new fixed configuration switch with some impressive spec also.  One thing missing from 3Com’s InterOp showing was much in the way of SMB products.  While the VCX VoIP system was on display it was focused on the enterprise as well.  This may leave some to wonder about where this leaves SMB customers of 3Com that has been using their Super Stack line of switches or the NBX VoIP platform.  With 3Com’s public statements about their focus on the enterprise this may be up for debate.  But if you are an enterprise organization with the need to get maximum performance while saving some money you might want to give them a second look.

If you have not heard someone talking about “The Cloud” of late they/you must be living under a rock.  With everyone from startups to Cisco taking about how everything will one day live in The Cloud you can’t help but have questions.  What is The Cloud, how does it work, how can I use it, how secure is it?  At a basic level The Cloud is more of a coming together of many different technologies like virtualization, hosting, and web applications to allow you to move applications and services that have traditionally been inside your network out to a third party to help reduce cost, provide better access and enable greater scalability.  You will hear other terms used with talking about Cloud Computing like Utility Computing, HaaS, SaaS, and Taas.  Many large organizations have been using these technologies for years in their own internal data centers.  But with advances in these technologies and bandwidth becoming cheaper by the day it is possible for companies of any size to take advantage by using this utility based model.  It is also possible for large organizations to move more basic services outside their network to save money.  While this all sounds great there are many things to consider before you jump on the cloud bandwagon.  I recently read two articles from Network World that do a good job of outlining details of Cloud Computing and some of the issues and benefits of it.  Cloud Computing FAQ  and Five Reasons.  While these are just a start they will allow you to begin thinking about what is possible and if you need more help don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Those of you that know me know that I am a tech addict.  I live on the bleeding edge and have the scars to prove it. So when my carrier Verizon Wireless announced a touchscreen Blackberry called the Storm I was there the first day get it.  I won't bore you with the pain that I went through to get the thing.  Now after several months of using it I can truly say that I can't wait for the next big thing so that I can move on to something new.  
I have had a Apple IPhone for quite and a while and had hope that I would finally get an all in one devices that had the best of everything (music, video, mail, contacts, calendar and corporate control) and was on a carrier that worked the way I wanted.  Don't get me wrong the Storm is a great device to look at and at first seems really like it might have it all.  But quickly I realized that no one will ever be able to out do Apple when it comes to ITunes for music, movies, and now applications getting from my PC (It is actually a MAC, but that is for another post) or over the air to my device.  Nor will a touch screen with or without a tactile screen be as easy to type on as a Blackberry with real buttons.  Beyond that the Storm is a little quirky when it comes to the way it handles both the screen orientation and the touch screen.  I find that when I am changing orientation there are times that the picture and I have both changed orientation, but the background logic hasn't made it there yet.  This is extremely irritating when the phone rings in landscape mode and I pick it up and the screen moves to portrait mode but I can’t press the onscreen answer button as the system doesn’t realize where I am pressing is where the button should be yet.   I have learned to just use the hard buttons to answer the phone.  But other times when you change from one menu to another you find that an icon you push is no longer in that location and you are pressing a blank space, which causes the menu to change yet again.
But that is not the biggest issue, from time to time I have my Storm reboot mid email or phone call for no reason.  And when I say reboot, I mean go have a sandwich and wait a while kind of reboot.  I have done the firmware updates as they come up in hopes of getting better use of the device as I really like the way it looks even if it won’t take the place of my IPhone.  But it just hasn’t happened yet and I keep reading Blogs from other bleeding edgers that they have gone as far as getting their units replaced to no avail.  
So is it a perfect Storm, no but it might be cool to go out and splash around in the rain if you want a good looking device that works mostly like a Blackberry and don’t expect too much out of the extras in your device.  I hear there may be a Storm 2 coming out later this year and RIM has unveiled an application store to try and compete with ITunes.  I hope that RIM has taken a lot of notes and learned from those of us that have bled with this first generation and end up being able to put a device out that can at the least live up to what we expect from a Blackberry.  Either way I am counting down the days until I can justify going back to my Blackberry Pearl, what I consider the ultimate Blackberry to date.
    Thoughts?

Welcome to the Infinity Network Solutions BLOG.  This is the first entry of what we hope is a long running site for us to share our thoughts and information with you and for you to be able to comment and help guide the conversation.  This BLOG will be authored primarily by myself with help from time to time by the other members of our team.  We plan to share information on all things tech.  Since our company's primary focus is network infrastructure we will probably spend more time on the products and companies is this segment.  This does not mean that from time to time we will not talk about the iPhone or laptops.  So please stay tuned as we begin this journey into BLOGing.  

Robert C Betzel
President and CTO
Infinity Network Solutions, Inc.