On Fri, 11 May 2007, Randal Kohutek wrote:
I agree, 6500s or 4500s for distribution are where it's at ... Unfortunately they cost a lot. Which is why the suits are considering financing them by charging for the features they provide.
One way I've seen providers address is this to have two different classes of service offerings. One has redundancy built in and the other doesn't - then you price the offerings accordingly. That could apply to basic ping-and-power colo, managed services, or anything in between. The cost difference could be justified by the fact that the redundant service takes up resources (finite resources at that) on two different big expensive switches.
This has been a hot topic around the office, with all of us network guys saying `keep hsrp everywhere` because it makes our phones ring less, but we realize that network upgrades aren't free, which is making the non-IT folks all antsy.
And that's a very valid point. Many organizations pay different amounts of attention to manpower costs vs. capex to buy the big expensive switches and opex to keep things running. Manpower is (hopefully ;) in your organization) not cheap. jms