The Daily Network Monitor

I’m proud to report that the geeks here at The Daily Network Monitor did not tune in to the liveblogging or the live video of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote today. We were out eating sushi. But to ignore Apple makes no more sense than to ignore open source, to ignore Windows, or to ignore Cisco. I’ll leave it to the Apple fanboys to slobber over the latest iPhone enhancements, the new 8-core Mac pro and the frighteningly thin MacBook Air. I want to talk about the Time Capsule.

This is classic Apple. They didn’t invent the category or particularly innovate the technology, but they put together a set of existing technologies in a beautiful package that’s beautifully integrated with their other offerings. The Time Capsule is a wifi base station (seen those before) that allows USB print sharing (been there done that) and boasts up to a terabyte of network storage (yawn). So what makes this more appealing than, for example, Iomega’s StorCenter? How about out of the box integration with Apple’s Time Machine, a Vista-busting backup feature of the latest cat-themed Mac OS X? (Also, the StorCenter costs a little more, has one more USB port and RAID, and is very, very ugly.)

Sure, home network storage and backup are child’s play (sometimes literally) to the average networking pro. But ask yourself, network dudes, why can’t it be this elegant and easy at work, too?

Doubtless you’ve heard the phrase, “The cobbler’s children go barefoot” which means that sometimes professionals neglect their own families with regard to their profession.  As the marketing director with out of date business cards, I sympathize, but I think this is seldom true with networking professionals, or even IT types in general.  I bet half the readers of this blog have more bandwidth in their homes than at their office desks, and have probably wired up their in-laws and other relatives homes, too.

With CES firing up in Vegas this week, our thoughts turn from the cool tools at work to the cool toys at home.  Whatever Santa didn’t bring you can be seen - if not purchased - at CES.   On the home front, check out this news of home networking from CES - does your wired home do this?

In the HANA Home, consumers will be able to watch TV, time-shift their viewing, record live TV and push content from room to room within the home by using the HANA menus on any wired to wireless connected HDTV — all with guaranteed 400 Mbps guaranteed quality of service. The demo will illustrate how HANA uses whatever cabling they have in their home, be it coax, CAT5 or plastic optical fiber (POF), to interconnect their entertainment systems. Additionally, HD content will be transmitted wirelessly via a Wireless HDMI solution — with no loss of quality and full use of the HANA menus.The HANA Home at CES is sponsored by Samsung, Pulse-LINK, Oxford Semiconductor, Newnex, Firecomms and the 1394 Trade Association. These companies will showcase their home networking technology during the show.

That’s a lot of HD, with QoS, too no less!

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It’s also the last Friday before Christmas and New Years, the last pay period of the year, and for me, the pivot point between budgeting and planning ahead for 2008, and starting the performance review process looking back on 2007.

In January we’re going to kick off a marketing campaign with our new white paper about the skills and methods of the most effective network administrators and tying it in to the idea of new years resolutions. I wonder though, if the average network tech or admin could take a minute to reflect on the highs and lows of the year, what would really be the networking new years resolutions for 2008?

I suppose the usual stuff would be there - lose weight, quit smoking, save more money for retirement, volunteer more, work out more, write the great American novel - after all network admins are people too, but what kind of things do techies resolve to do next year? Perhaps some of these:

* Get Cisco certified
* Spend less time in World of Warcraft
* Finally replace that [fill in the flaky old piece of hardware of your choice]
* Write that blog you’ve always wanted to write, an expose of the life of a corporate IT professional
* Pay for those shareware utilities you depend on every day
* Drink less Mountain Dew
* Reduce the portion of your cubicle devoted to action figures to no more than 50%
* Demand the budget to upgrade your network management tools to the latest versions

OK, I guess that might be a little self-serving, but I’ll leave it to you to chime in with your own in the comments. What are your top networking resolutions for 2008?