Swordie Bloggie

Why is it every time Microsoft acquire something, others will get very uneasy?… The recent one is the acquisition of Skype. Microsoft announced its plan to acquired Skype in May last year and European Commission cleared Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition in October the same year.

But others especially video or web conferencing players are not happy with the acquisition. They are worried Microsoft will make the video conferencing technology closed… proprietary to itself. Cisco especially, wants the European court to impose tougher conditions on Microsoft Corp’s acquisition on Skype. Citing example, Cisco chief executive officer John Chambers said that when the Cisco acquired Norway’s Tandberg in 2009, the EU approved the deal under the condition it stick to open standards… Cisco wants the same condition applied to Microsoft.

Analyst said the global videoconferencing market will hit US$5bil in 2015 compared with US$2.2bil in 2010. Well, let’s hope Microsoft makes Skype video conferencing an open standard and not proprietary so that other video or web conferencing players such as Polycom and Citrix will be able cross-interact with each other’s and makes all consumers happy… 😀

One of the many to get Hewlett Packard ProCurve switch… need to replace the more than 10 years old Cisco hubs… yes HUB… but all of them… about 16 units with each having 16 UTP ports and a single fiber port as backbone have been running strong like bull… 24×7… for the past 10 years or so… and they are all rackmount type… and they cost a bomb each during its heyday… 😀

HP ProCurve switch with 24 UTP ports and 4 dual-personality ports for fiber connection.

So, 2010 is going to be a challenging year… to keep up the speed demand… or is it speed demon… speed hungry applications… 😛 But we can only speed up the LAN… for the LAN applications… but there is no way for us to get a better WAN speed… 😛 hoping 2010 will give us more WAN speed for us to reach the world out there… 😛

HP Mini GBIC for fiber connection.

Mounting kit for the rackmount switch.

While searching for information about Cisco hub, I came across with Sapia Network. They are selling used network stuffs like router, switch, VoIP phone, and many more. The used network devices in their offering are from well know brands like Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, Extreme, Marconi, Riverstone and Brocade.

I was not looking for used cisco hub or anything but I just want to get some information about our old Cisco FastHub. You must be wondering why I keep on mentioning ‘hub’ instead of ‘switch’.

Well, our network was setup in the late nineties, around 1997. During that time, switch is not that commonly available and it can cost a bomb… but not as much as a warhead 😀

Our backbone are taken care by the 12 ports Cisco FastHub 100 FX, all 12 ports are fiber port. And the rest of the hub are Cisco FastHub 300 series, which has 16 ports only. The 16 ports are 15 100BaseTX ports and one 100BaseFX port for linking UTP devices to a fiber Fast Ethernet backbone. If I ask you to guess the price of the 16 ports Cisco FastHub on that time, you will not be able to give me a correct guess. Well, the cost of the hub at that time is almost RM10K each… yes almost RM10k for a mere 16 ports hub… not even a 16 ports switch!

Today, a 16 ports switch will cost less than RM1k, depending on the brand and features it has. But although switch technology is faster than hub, some of today’s switch will not be able to beat that more than 10 years old Cisco FastHub technology… it is rock solid! They have been working 24×7 since 1997. Of course we lost some of it because of bad main power supply… but 80% are still working.