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That seems like a pretty silly argument to me. The library with 4 computers would be just fine with the $60 router. How is it any harder to manage that gear com

That seems like a pretty silly argument to me. The library with 4 computers would be just fine with the $60 router. How is it any harder to manage that gear compared to managing the completely unneeded equipment that the local employees have no clue how to run. Not to mention spending $14k on upgrades for many places that don't need that particular upgrade. I don't care if it's a little simpler to buy all the same, it's absurd to spend millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on something that is completely unnecessary.

glesica 14y ago
I'm not really sure where it came from, but the Slashdot summary states that a lot of these things were never even un-boxed. If true, that's an incredible waste and far-outweighs any convenience or stability benefits gained by using homogeneous hardware. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/11/1937235/west-virginia-buys-22k-routers-with-stimulus-puts-them-in-small-schools http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/11/1937235/west-virginia...
ghshephard 14y ago
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. :-)
- clarky07 14y ago
  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.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    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.
    - benmccann 14y ago
      That's pretty circular logic. If they were given a $60 Linksys then it wouldn't be a $126M investment. It'd be a $1M investment.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  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.

glesica 14y ago

I'm not really sure where it came from, but the Slashdot summary states that a lot of these things were never even un-boxed. If true, that's an incredible waste and far-outweighs any convenience or stability benefits gained by using homogeneous hardware. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/11/1937235/west-virginia-buys-22k-routers-with-stimulus-puts-them-in-small-schools http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/11/1937235/west-virginia...

ghshephard 14y ago

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. :-)

clarky07 14y ago
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.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  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.
  - benmccann 14y ago
    That's pretty circular logic. If they were given a $60 Linksys then it wouldn't be a $126M investment. It'd be a $1M investment.
ghshephard 14y ago
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.