What to Know Before Upgrading Your Cisco Router

Telepresence and Holography / Holograms - November 2008

Editor’s viewpoint on their differences, likenesses and future...

We all just recently viewed an historic CNN holographic interview on an historic Election Night. CNN stated this type of imaging has never been done before on National TV and I believe that. I haven’t seen anything like it. The live interview caught me by surprise and sure had the “wow” factor attached to it didn’t it? Here’s a link to the actual interview.

CNN Hologram Video

The question now has to be asked. Is it Telepresence?

I’m no expert on the subject but I’m going to throw my hat into the ring, go out on a limb and say yes, I believe it is. Although I know many video conferencing purists are rolling their eyes and grabbing their guns right about now with my statement.

While I do know that Telepresence still hasn’t been universally defined (Houston, we have a problem), here’s how I see it…. Broken down to its simplest form - “tele” (through electronic means) and “presence” (present). This is how I’m justifying my opinion by lumping holography and Telepresence together. Just as Telepresence is surely an offshoot of video conferencing, holographic imaging (like we viewed on CNN) surely has to be considered an offshoot of Telepresence. The interviewer was “telepresent” from Chicago and beamed into the CNN Election Headquarters. She was most assuredly - “telepresent”. There was negligible latency, the imaging was fantastic and both interviewers were rehearsed on what they would say. I’ve just recently read that CNN actually “downgraded” the experience to make it “movie” quality and not as good as it could have been. Maybe they thought us mere mortals would be shocked if they showed their complete hand. I have a feeling it was so big to them, they didn’t want it to get upstaged by the historic election. I’m willing to bet we’ll see the “true” power of this technology in the upcoming weeks and months when they can put the pedal to the medal and show it off without having it sidetracked.

What an amazing time for this technology (all differences and opinions aside). Telepresence Doctors, nurses, teachers, schools and healthcare (healthpresence) will benefit from the recent gains in this state-of-the-art industry whether holograms, Telepresence or holography. Airlines also have to see the threat to a portion of their business travel. Hell, who wants go through security and fly to Miami for a two-hour conference when you can look them in the eye via Telepresence?

Beam me up Scotty! Simply amazing…!

Visit the free Telepresence Forum for more information and discussion

Your Editor and Administrator - L II
"Ride on the Next Plane of Existence" TM

Expanding the capacity of any high bandwidth network is always an involved process. The actual cost of upgrade hardware and the task of physically installing RAM memory into your Cisco routers' expansion slots is simple enough, but most high-capacity data networks serve production environments which demand fault-tolerance and as near to total uptime as possible. In order to build a network that can be relied upon to guarantee this level of service, network engineers need to plan a long way ahead. In addition to ensuring the servers, workstations, cabling and software can handle increasing loads for years to come, when planning a new segment, a good engineer will consider the possible lifetime cost and load of each and every crucial device on the network. This includes Cisco routers!

As it may be difficult to even temporarily disconnect a mission-critical router to upgrade its memory, one way to "future proof" your network is to upgrade the device at purchase - prior to installation. This may sound expensive, but in any truly high-bandwidth medium, the cost of downtime or loss of connectivity far outweighs the safe option of upgrading your routers memory to the maximum before installing it.

If you do indeed decide to take the path of pre-upgrading a Cisco router for life, you will be choosing to save yourself from ever having to take it out of commission in order to install new Cisco DRAM memory or flash. Though the cost may be significant, not upgrading presents even more significant risks. It's well known that a router is more likely to fail if it is run with insufficient RAM for it to cope with its workload.

This raises the question of Cisco memory will be enough over the lifetime of a given product. Unfortunately, there's no simple answer to this question: How much RAM a Cisco router is going to need changes depending on the enterprise and its scale, what sort of applications your network is (and will be) supporting, and of course, which series router you're using. Cisco makes some forecasts and recommendations available to customers to assist in making this judgment.

Generally, upgrading to the maximum memory your router is capable of supporting takes some of the guesswork out of this equation. The Cisco memory requirements for each are made available in individual the product specifications, and Cisco lists which product lines will be supported at least 18 months in advance. In this way, a diligent network analyst may make fairly accurate predictions of what their individual requirements will be for at least the next couple of years, and likely, much longer.

After checking the installation procedure and maximum upgrade capacity for your particular Cisco router, you have two options, either purchasing the memory directly from Cisco at a considerable markup, or from a memory reseller such as PC Wholesale. Memory resellers offer a tremendous advantage over purchasing directly from Cisco for the budget conscious company ? many times their prices can be up to 90% off Cisco?s list price, for the same exact memory!

Sterling Christian writes exclusively for PC Wholesale. Sterling writes about the use, operation and upgrading of Cisco and Sun Microsystems devices. PC Wholesale carries Cisco Approved memory, Sun original memory, & third-party memory for all Sun and Cisco devices. www.pc-wholesale.com.

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To learn more about Telepresence, the revolutionary new style of immersive video conferencing; visit these websites:

Telepresence - "Ride on the Next Plane of Existence" - Telepresence
Telepresence Web Portal - Telepresence Internet web portal
Telepresence Report - 24/7 breaking Telepresence related news and information
Via Telepresence - Video conferencing via Telepresence
Telepresence Forum - Free user discussion forum for everything Telepresence related
Telepresence Today - Telepresence information and editor qualified headline news
Telepresence Resource Directory - Telepresence web resource directory
Telepresence Tube - Telepresence videos, pictures and more