RE: Single-vendor vs. best-of-breed network
What, if anything, makes a multi-vendor (wide-area) network successful and worth the risks over the "safe" single-vendor network nobody gets fired for buying (you can probably guess what vendor Powers my network now).
I like thinking of where an organization wants to be on a risk/reward spectrum. Newer and/or point solution vendors exist to leapfrog the status quo and give you an advantage, which they do very well. This is particularly true on the optical side, where lasers, components, and software have all changed dramatically. The price you pay is risk. If you don't have capacity problems or take an incumbent role, then you would prefer a defensive, conservative strategy favoring the single-vendor solution. ------ We actually consider risk and choice of vendor to be to be separate principle areas. It is certainly easy to be risky with your use of technology while embracing a single vendor approach, think VoIP. I'd consider ripping out PBX's in favor of VoIP to be risky, and it is certainly a leading edge approach, yet you can buy this type of solution today from the larger vendors. In one example we worked with a customer who was considering using L3 switches with newly released WAN blades in the core of their network. The conservative approach was to stick with a more proven platform, the risky approach was to go with the newer product. Their principles were to use a single vendor, but they also had a principle to use only stable and mature technologies in the core, so they went with the more traditional routing platform. BTW, we also separate out vendor risk - e.g. we create a principle that determines how much vendor risk to accept. The extremes are only buying from proven vendors vs. buying from start-ups with low market share, provided there is some competitive advantage to be gained. Irwin
On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 01:34:44PM -0700, Irwin Lazar reportedly typed:
What, if anything, makes a multi-vendor (wide-area) network successful and worth the risks over the "safe" single-vendor network nobody gets fired for buying (you can probably guess what vendor Powers my network now).
I like thinking of where an organization wants to be on a risk/reward spectrum. Newer and/or point solution vendors exist to leapfrog the status quo and give you an advantage, which they do very well. This is particularly true on the optical side, where lasers, components, and software have all changed dramatically. The price you pay is risk. If you don't have capacity problems or take an incumbent role, then you would prefer a defensive, conservative strategy favoring the single-vendor solution.
You have to quantify those comments a little bit more. In an IP network, when you mix vendors for a particular application, you do not gain speed at all, but in fact, quite the opposite. Allow me to provide an extreme example. Let's say you select vendor A for it's MPLS VPN capabilities on the edge. Then you decide that you like the density for a certain customer size in vendor B better. You implement both vendors for this application, but in doing so, you must now use only the variety of MPLS-based VPNs that are compatible between vendors. Any particular VPN variety that provides unique capabilities will not be available to you until both vendors implement a compatible, possibly even standards-based version. This liability extends into your core as well. A mixed-vendor core cannot implement several advanced MPLS pre-standard capabilities, such as fast-reroute, even though interoperability issues have been worked out for most basic MPLS functions. I use MPLS as an example, but any vendor specific pre-standard capability would apply, such as UTI, SRP(DPT), cdp, etc. Your functionality becomes least common demoninator. Your product capability is limited by the slowest of the two vendors to implement, not the fastest. You can mitigate this problem by carving up your network into roles. Core, Internet edge, VPN edge, etc. Then you can pick the best of breed within that role, but all roles need not be a single vendor. Obviously, substantial testing is necessary...YMMV. Dave -- Dave Siegel HOME 520-877-2593 dave at siegelie dot com WORK 520-877-2628 dsiegel at gblx dot net Director, IP Engineering, Global Crossing
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Dave Siegel -
Irwin Lazar