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Cisco

Approach to Quality
Cisco's approach to quality can be condensed down to one phrase: "ensuring our customer success". The information contained in this section will help you to gain a better understanding of Cisco's Business Management System, which allows us to accomplish that success. Cisco's Business Management System is made up of two parts; the Quality Management System and the Environmental Management System.

Cisco Fun Facts
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in San Jose, California, in the center of Silicon Valley, that develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Through its numerous acquired subsidiaries, such as OpenDNS, WebEx, Jabber and Jasper, Cisco specializes into specific tech markets, such as Internet of Things (IoT), domain security and energy management.

Cisco is the largest networking company in the world. The stock was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 8, 2009, and is also included in the S&P 500 Index, the Russell 1000 Index, NASDAQ-100 Index and the Russell 1000 Growth Stock Index.

Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two Stanford University computer scientists, who pioneered the concept of a local area network (LAN) being used to connect geographically disparate computers over a multiprotocol router system. By the time the company went public in 1990, when it was listed on the NASDAQ, Cisco had a market capitalization of $224 million. Cisco was the most valuable company in the world by 2000, with a more than $500 billion market capitalization

Here are some great product categories from Cisco;

Cisco Switch Modules

Cisco Switches & Bridges

Cisco Wireless Access Points

Cisco Routers & Gateways
Cisco Switch Modules
Cisco Firewalls

Learn more about Sata/Ultra ATA Controllers

What is a RAID controller?

A RAID (redundant array of independent disks) combines multiple physical drives into one virtual storage device that offers more storage and, in most cases, fault tolerance so that data can be recovered even if one of the physical disks fails. A RAID controller is a hardware device or software program used to manage hard disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs) in a computer or storage array so they work as a logical unit.

A controller offers a level of abstraction between an operating system and the physical drives. A RAID controller presents groups to applications and operating systems as logical units for which data protection schemes can be defined. Because the controller has the ability to access multiple copies of data on multiple physical devices, it has the ability to improve performance and protect data in the event of a system crash. There are different levels of raid as well, typically the higher the number, the more redundancy your data will have. In some cases 1-2 hard drives can go down before you will be impacted! Another caveat with RAID is the ability to actually speed up your hard drive performance. The more drives you have in your array the more redundant and faster your I/O will become!

In hardware-based RAID, a physical controller is used to manage the RAID array. The controller can take the form of a PCI or PCI Express (PCIe) card, which is designed to support a specific drive format such as SATA or SCSI. (Some RAID controllers can also be integrated with the motherboard.) A RAID controller may also be software-only, using the hardware resources of the host system. Software-based RAID generally provides similar functionality to hardware-based RAID, but its performance is typically less than that of the hardware versions.