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  As the marketing director with out of date business cards, I sympathize, but I think this is seldom true with networking professionals, or even IT types in general.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!