Fat chance.
Cisco suggests shovelling money into their coffers, for their latest and greatest Swiss Cheese flavoured offerings.
Anyone with even a little networking knowledge suggests steering well clear.
Cisco suggests a stubby chassis, shrunken servers and router, to tame the edge
Cisco entered the server market in 2009 because the company thought incumbent vendors weren’t satisfying customers. On Monday, the networking giant entered the edge infrastructure market for the same reason. Switchzilla's entry to the market is dubbed the "Unified Edge," a name that reflects its belief that infrastructure …
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Tuesday 4th November 2025 09:28 GMT Bebu sa Ware
"designed so staff without IT skills, such as managers in a retail environment"
That should be interesting ...
Actually store managers are likely to run a proverbial mile (1.6km) before messing with this stuff.
It's the new hires or work experience kids who reckon with the assistance of ChatGPT or StackExchange, they are the full bottle on IT that would give me nightmares.
— "Noli futuis quod non intelligis."
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Tuesday 4th November 2025 12:53 GMT Giles C
When i worked supporting a number of retail outfits…
Well ok 800 Thomas Cook shops…
We used to find that the cable fairies had visited overnight, how else did the wan router port suddenly move into the AUX or console port of the switch.
The helpdesk swore they never told people to move cables and all we could do was to send a field engineer to basically plug cables back in.
Retail store staff are generally not techies
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Wednesday 5th November 2025 10:42 GMT vogon00
Re: When i worked supporting a number of retail outfits…
I used to work at a firm that produced mobile computing platforms for people. These contained various mini PCI-e cards to provide whatever function was required.
On one job, we supplied over ~200 machines each fitted with a cellular modem and GNSS receiver. If you've not dug into one of these, configuring the thing to function as you need it to is a bit of a challenge as it's sodding complicated, the documentation for the device is only about 85-90% accurate, and even then the behavior is not as quite as described in the docs. All of which meant the perception of our overall product was tied to the very 'fussy' configuration of this internal module.
I set the config-change password to a non-default value, deliberately preventing the end user messing with it, at least without talking to us (Well, me) first. This worked well for a few months, with the end user saying 'can it do this instead', me trying it, and the passing the info on what to do,how to do it AND why it's done. The people I worked with knew what they didn't know and were very happy with the arrangement.
A few months later, there were changes at end-user 'X'. They now no longer liked the arrangement and wanted to do it all in-house. Knowing their skill-set, I argued against this, but my boss+their boss over-ruled that and I therefore disclosed the necessary passwords, and provided instruction on how to take and restore the configuration backups for these 'embedded' devices.
Turned out to be a bad decision. I was forced to spent hours logged in remotely (using the simple 'remote support' tools I'd insisted was included) fixing problems caused by them. Turns out they were changing things after reading sketchy info from the web, or manufacturer's docs for a different product, and then not checking things worked as they expected. Dickheads.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
