A unnamed company runs a ccMail infrastructure with ~3,000 mail accounts and at least ~2,000 of those on a Novell 4.11 machine on a Pentium 166. That box can handle ~1,700 concurrent users with no problem. You can figure the cost, we could put that together with spare parts nearly! It WILL be replaced with MS Exchange. Cost to create the same infrastructure? About 1.2million and ~8 boxes including a DEC Alpha ~300-500mhz. A Linux/FreeBSD with IMAP,SMTP,LDAP etc. or even Netscape solution would be much cheaper too ;-) Its not even a question. Its been a corporate directive. Go figure. I gave up on common sense in corporate America a long time ago! On Mon, May 25, 1998 at 08:03:28PM -0700, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
At 09:59 PM 5/25/98 -0400, Dean Anderson wrote:
Somehow, I think networking is and will remain hard enough that there won't be very many such idiots in the networking marketplace. I concede that this might be an unreasonable expectation however.
This is already demostrobly wrong. Look at the Fortune 500 - or any group of "large corporations" - and see who makes these type of decitions. I wouldn't hesitate to give you 10 to 1 odds that well over half of these individuals couldn't tell ethernet from token ring.
Now, the good ones have "smart" people helping them, making recomendations or some such, but they still make the final decision. And a lot of times the marketing/sales guy can get in and make their mind up for them before a recomendation is made. Or the sales guy plays golf with the president or something and does the deal that way - with absolutely zero technical input.