Hi Howard,
--- "Howard C. Berkowitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >This is all well and good for the big time players, ISPs, big
> corps
> >yadda yadda yadda, and companies with cash to burn like so much
> old toilet
> >paper. The Small and Midsized Business market (SMB) almost always
> can
> >accomplish what they want with free Unix or Linux for layer 3 and
> >cheap stackable switches with or without 802.1q support.
> >
> >So my obligatory cisco alternative:
> >www.zebra.org
>
> And, in a non-information technology related SMB, who installs and
> supports it?
Good question.
I think under 1,000 employees is reasonable for a mid-sized company.
Less than 400 is a rough estimate for a small company. These
companies tend to already have people taking care of their NT/Novell
servers. Typically they already have file servers, print servers, and
sometimes a router or two. Maybe an Exchange server, Groupwise, or
perhaps they've thrown together a home grown solution with qmail plus
mysql plus cucipop. Throw in some switches to hook it all together.
Maybe no 802.1d or VLANs in the mix, but still, a sustainable
technology environment.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch for their in-house staff to
maintain Linux or FreeBSD. College grads are already familiar with
these free systems, or ought to be. Presumably, in-house staff should
already know OSI, TCP/IP, and IPX. Thus, the learning curve isn't too
much of a stretch.
And routing isn't too difficult, really. Especially in small
environments: Anyone reasonably intelligent who knows TCP/IP
intimately, can manage routing, or a firewall for that matter. Or
learn how to. Anyone reasonably adept with a CLI can learn IOS. (IOS,
in fact, is a far more primitive environment than the Unix shell.)
I've worked for small companies. The limited resources require
sysadmins who can wear several hats and learn quickly. It's just the
nature of the beast, nasty, brutish, but for expediency's sake, as
variegated as the business needs require.
Just my humble opinion,
anthony
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