Interestingly enough - I can see both sides of the argument. When I was building the IT infrastructure for SSN, I ran the company's IT and it's dozen employees on a $75 linksys (and a half-dozen Poweredge Dell Server) for the first 5-6 months. Eventually, we grew to around 20 employees, picked up a data center colo-cabinet for our customer apps and needed a bit more robustness, so I purchased a $300 used Cisco 2621xm, a couple T1 WICs for $500, and ran the company for the next year on that 3 mbit pipe - the company got to around 50 employees before we moved. For the first two years of its life I spent a grand total of $875 on routing hardware and 50 employees were able to get their work done (including code pushes to our data center) over that 3 mbit pipe.
When I handed over network engineering, though, our last purchase order for networking equipment (with around 500 employees) - was north of $500K (including very hefty Cisco Discounts) (This isn't including the Data Center infrastructure - by then we had colo space in three data centers - just the corporate infrastructure for three buildings)
It's hard to explain without living through it - but the decisions that make sense when you are small, and you aren't paying your network engineers $150K/year (fully loaded), and you aren't trying to figure out how to handle pager duty, and warehouse and deal with RMAs, and support various types of hardware, and worry about rotating inventory, and dealing with upgrade cycles, and manage security, and patch levels, and remote administrations - not even considering future feature enhancements and performance (75 mbits sounds great today - but what about the future?) - when you get to scale, the CapEx (the capital cost of the hardware) starts to have fewer consequences on a technology investment (particularly over 10 years) than the other elements. Not to mention that there are also political issues (Layer 8) associated with differing levels of services/features for small population centers versus large population centers.
Yes - this does result in seemingly ludicrous situations like a 4 computer library being run on a ISR capable of running 350 mbits/second without breaking a sweat - but in 5-8 years from now, some technology administrator for the state will take over that infrastructure, and I can guarantee you that they won't be thinking "My God, we're over provisioned on our networking equipment" - but instead, "Thank goodness I have a few more years of runway before we have to replace all this gear."
I realize I haven't fully fleshed out the argument as to why it might make sense to put these hefty branch routers into smaller locales, but hopefully it doesn't sound silly.
Hey - at least they didn't roll out 6509s in all these libraries. Now that would be something I could rant against. :-)
These problems with managing at "scale" btw, are one of the reasons why consumerization of IT is so popular. The reality is that individual decisions made at small scale, can sometimes be orders of magnitude more efficient than by the enterprise. Example - Our company doesn't have a policy regarding mobile device OS upgrades - which means they don't have to worry about standardizing on a particular mobile device, or test "authorized apps" (or even have authorized apps) against the OS upgrade, or manage the OS updates, etc... Basically, a few early adopters will do an OTA upgrade, watch it for a few days, and if their device doesn't brick or crash more frequently, and the forums seem to indicate it's a good version - they'll send out a note to an internal alias and everybody else will just upgrade their device. Absolutely zero corporate overhead required.
This is true of all sorts of "edge" infrastructure - Skype clients, IM clients, Laptops, backups (now that we have backblaze/crashplan), etc...
Deploying at scale loses all sorts of that efficiency, and should be reserved for "Core" things like your exchange server, filer, and networking. For everything else - try to empower your users - they'll probably be better at it than you will be doing it centrally.
This is a great thought - when talking about a growing business. Comparing it to a public library in a very small town (just over 6k) doesn't make any sense though. For the money, the library can buy a new router every year for next couple of centuries and keep up with current technology. Or we could have bought them a router and then given them $21,940 for new computers, books, facility upgrades etc.
Remember - these decisions weren't being made by the library, or for a 500 person company, they were part of a $126 million dollar infrastructure upgrade for over 1000 sites for the state of west virginia. The point I was trying to make was that the decision that makes sense for that library (individually - say the local librarian was given $25,000 and given freedom to spend it however they chose - they would probably do exactly as you suggested - drop $60 on a linksys and the rest on computers/books), no longer makes sense when you are rolling out $126 million worth of equipment. The most realistic alternative decision would have been to downgrade the library from a $7800 Cisco 3945 to a $2800 Cisco 2921 (an ISR with less capacity, but reasonably similar features and management). The Library would then have been on a 75 mbit/sec platform for the next 10 years. They wouldn't have received any of the savings to spend on books/computers, etc... They would have just gotten less capable networking equipment.
I could probably defend either decision (Going heterogenous 2921 (small) + 3945 (big) vs homogenous 3945 across the state) - but I know the one that would let me sleep easy for the next 10 years.
The problem with this argument is that the blanket purchase only provides giant imagined future capacity for the smallest users. If they will actually need this quality of a router in 5-8 years, then the big users will definitely need even bigger ones. But apparently the state is OK with the biggest users not having that much breathing room. So why do the smaller ones need it?
The first thing that comes to my mind is that in 5-8 years, as the State of west Virginia starts to run out of headroom in the larger locations, they can selectively upgrade that 5% or so that require something larger, while leaving the other 95% on the previous iteration.
Also - one thing I've learned about networking sites (real world experience, two companies that went from a dozen to 500+) is that once you are able to satisfy one person with sufficient pipe - that same bandwidth is usually sufficient for the 20-50 people. The reality is that need for bandwidth is very bursty.
And in 5-8 years, there will be more powerful equipment available at lower prices for that 5% of infrastructure. And you still have 1100 5-8 year old routers at all your locations that might not be capable of running whatever physical layer link we're using 5-8 years from now.
Future proofing is one thing. This is like buying a 747 for a route that serves a dozen passengers a flight to prepare them for the future.
> The first thing that comes to my mind is that in 5-8 years ... they can selectively upgrade that 5% or so that require something larger, while leaving the other 95% on the previous iteration.
In other words, they'll be in the exact same position that they were evidently trying to avoid from the start.
The thing is that these libraries are not going to grow to several hundred seats in the next 5-10 years, like the company you worked for. They will remain at their level of 5-20 seats. As such there is no need, nor will there ever be, for such strong infrastructure in a small communal library. They'd easily be able to make do with buying a 100$ router every second year.
This smug, platitudinous self-serving drivel is all that a network executive needs to know to misspend millions of dollars. You conveniently neglect to mention remote network management facilities that will handle configuration and monitoring of the routers that could have been purchased instead of a fully loaded 3945, including the $487 CISCO router that was mentioned in the article. How do you justify this preposterous expense? "What if the state decides on an unprecedented expansion of library facilities?" In this economic climate? "What if homeland security needs emergency facilities and this is the only site available?" You didn't read the article where two identical enterprise level routers were installed in the same little neighborhood. What about the efforts to engage ham radio operators--West Virginia is full of them. So much for the big picture. You live in a world where automating the administrative aspects of networking hasn't kept up with the network devices themselves. At least that's what you tell your superiors. It's as if remote network management facilities don't exist and you're still upgrading IOS on routers state-wide by hand with TFTP. Don't tell me: you support one-size-fits all cable management for the state too.
Yes exactly, homeland security will need emergency facilities for the next terrorist attack and they can conveniently use the libraries. It's a good thing they had an ex-homeland security person to manage these tough decisions and prepare the libraries for the coming internet armaggedon.
When I handed over network engineering, though, our last purchase order for networking equipment (with around 500 employees) - was north of $500K (including very hefty Cisco Discounts) (This isn't including the Data Center infrastructure - by then we had colo space in three data centers - just the corporate infrastructure for three buildings)
It's hard to explain without living through it - but the decisions that make sense when you are small, and you aren't paying your network engineers $150K/year (fully loaded), and you aren't trying to figure out how to handle pager duty, and warehouse and deal with RMAs, and support various types of hardware, and worry about rotating inventory, and dealing with upgrade cycles, and manage security, and patch levels, and remote administrations - not even considering future feature enhancements and performance (75 mbits sounds great today - but what about the future?) - when you get to scale, the CapEx (the capital cost of the hardware) starts to have fewer consequences on a technology investment (particularly over 10 years) than the other elements. Not to mention that there are also political issues (Layer 8) associated with differing levels of services/features for small population centers versus large population centers.
Yes - this does result in seemingly ludicrous situations like a 4 computer library being run on a ISR capable of running 350 mbits/second without breaking a sweat - but in 5-8 years from now, some technology administrator for the state will take over that infrastructure, and I can guarantee you that they won't be thinking "My God, we're over provisioned on our networking equipment" - but instead, "Thank goodness I have a few more years of runway before we have to replace all this gear."
I realize I haven't fully fleshed out the argument as to why it might make sense to put these hefty branch routers into smaller locales, but hopefully it doesn't sound silly.
Hey - at least they didn't roll out 6509s in all these libraries. Now that would be something I could rant against. :-)