New Podcast: Samuel Rausch of Comcast: Engineering SIP Timers End-to-End for Optimal Network Performance

At the SIPNOC 2011 Conference held 2011 April 26-27 in Reston, Virginia, Samuel Rausch of Comcast spoke about their project tuning SIP Timers to improve failover performance in their network. They were able to successfully make network faults invisible by tuning the timers appropriately.

I sat down with Samuel during a break in the conference and recorded a short interview on his presentation.

You can listen to the interview by subscribing to the 200OK.info Podcast:

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Cisco Pricing: Easier to get than ever.

Cisco has made it much easier for engineers to properly account for costs when evaluating alternatives and options. They've published a very extensive list of product part numbers and retail pricing.

The standard way to estimate pricing on larger items (like routers) involves a long and arduous back-and-forth with a Cisco reseller. The reseller does help by configuring the proper combination of parts, but the turnaround time of hours or or days can be a real deterrent to using Cisco.

The job of the sales team should be to help evaluate what I need, propose good solutions, and then answer the questions that aren't already answered in online documentation. Amazingly for Cisco, they don't really make it easy to even contact a sales team. I'm often in the role of recommending Cisco (or other manufacturer) equipment to folks, but Cisco doesn't give me any way to have a chat with a competent sales rep.

Cisco, Juniper, Foundry and others should follow Dell's and IBM's model of giving pricing instantly, online, with a smart configuration tool. But this move by Cisco, publishing the MSRP pricing online, is an excellent first start. It will help us engineers and designers know much more rapidly what cost-effective alternatives exist.

A Microsoft-Excel-free version of Cisco's spreadsheet is available here.