Myself, I have used the Prolific cables for years and have been generally happy with them. The driver for the chip used by Cisco is conveniently included in OS X, but the FTDI and Prolific chips require their own drivers. There’s also another manufactured by FTDI, which I’ve heard good things about, and of course the one built into recent Cisco hardware. The one pictured in the article is manufactured by Prolific, but sold by multiple different vendors. There are a couple different USB to serial adapters that you might use as a network engineer.
