Did anyone else know this?

[Jay]

Blimey!
And I have trouble sometimes persuading some small business clients that spending £200 on a draytek router is a good investment!

lol... same here.

[Moby-Dick]

SMB's see IT and particularly infrastructure as an expense , not a key enabling part of their business. When you can associate a direct cost with down time , its a lot easier to persuade people to invest in said infrastructure.

[burble]

Our business is totally reliant on the IT infrastructure and because they have seen the problems int he past that under investment can cause they now understand the need for doing things properly rather then cheaply.

We're not a big company (circa €200M) and I have far from a bottomless pit of money but for the most part money isn't an issue these days.

[Jay]

the way I pitch it is that it's 1 part of a business key infrastructure "how would your business run without your managment team?" "how would your business run without a chain of command?" "think of IT as a managment team and chain of command for all the data and knowledge your business has aquired over X amount of years."

Lack of understanding and the willingness for the top people to admit that they dont understand is a massive problem in todays businesses. I find the people at the top are the most likely to stand in your way or refuse to ask for help and then blame IT for their mistakes. This will change as the 80s and 90s generation start getting into those positions but at the moment most MDs are from the old school of business and that does not mix well with IT.

There is one way that these people can be made to accept change and for you to get what the business needs without a lot of fuss. What you need to do is make it seem to the MD or board that it is their idea, as if they are in controll. When you install the new bit of kit etc you then need to congratulate them on a very good idea. Over time they begin to say yes to your ideas as they feel more at ease with you and the system.

[Viper81]

When you say "do not allow their IOS to be transfered" does that mean that it wouldn't be supported by Cisco or it just doesn't work?

yes but our 48 port switches are VERY expensive. There is no way I can budget for a backup. I may have to look at a procurve.

The procurve's are nice pieces of kit which (depending on the model) have most of the functionality of the equivavlent Cisco and a lifetime warranty to boot. It might be a good choice for you (especially considering the price difference!)

[funkymunky]

When you say "do not allow their IOS to be transfered" does that mean that it wouldn't be supported by Cisco or it just doesn't work?



The procurve's are nice pieces of kit which (depending on the model) have most of the functionality of the equivavlent Cisco and a lifetime warranty to boot. It might be a good choice for you (especially considering the price difference!)

I'd second that, ProCurve kit is excellent. I work for an ISP and we use ProCurve switches across the network for both edge and core.

We'll have around 36,000 edge ports after this summer with the vast majority of edge switches being Procurve devices, so obivously that's a large amount of switches. We just don't get problems with them, they're rock solid. The only 2 we've had fail and that was due to water getting in them. We also have some Cisco and 3Com switches that were inherited, the Cisco's aren't bad but aren't great either. The 3Com devices are awful.

They're also nice to work with, the CLI is much better to use than IOS in my opinion. They come with a lifetime warranty, no ongoing support costs, very good price, and have great performance.

I was down at ProCurve Labs earlier this year playing with ProCurve Manager+. Some of the features are very impressive. Having said that we don't use it, our network is too big.

And no, I don't work for them

[Jay]

The IOS will work but its like using a dodgy copy of XP

[tsj]

You could always *rent* the IOS's