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i've been told that if i ran a tier-1 i would lose my love for the vni/pni approach, which i think scales quite nicely even when it involves an ethernet cable through the occasional ceiling. perhaps i'll eat these words when and if that promotion comes through. meanwhile, disintermediation is still my favorite word in the internet dictionary. i like it when one's competitors

As we have seen before in previous lives, and I'm pretty sure stephen stuart will step in, normalizing "throw the ethernet over the wall" school of design just leads to an incredible amount of pain when trying to operate, run and actually document what you've got.

that only happens if you grow, though. in other words it's a nice problem to have. i guess i'll defer to the people who have started from scratch and gotten all the way up to having the problem you describe. i met a lot of them though my PAIX experience. you should defer to them on this point also.

I thought it was illustrative to take a look at some of the other messages in this thread. People rushing in to argue the scale comment when the actual heart of the matter was something else entirely, which apparently only Tony managed to get.

i understood and agreed with tony's point. and during my mfn experience i was quite supportive of normalization, and was quite damning in my curses of what had been doing done in the early/growth period "before my time." but that doesn't mean that the occasional ethernet cable over the ceiling isn't the right business decision for people who have done what many here have not done, which is to say, started from scratch.

In any case, I am going to pull a randy here and strongly encourage my competitors to deploy this "ethernet over ceiling tile" engineering methodology.

i would think that was puerile and shallow no matter who actually said it.