>Anthony Kim wrote, 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 you are assuming larger sizes as "S" and "M" than does Cisco.
When I did Cisco seminars for SMB resellers, one of the sales
strawmen for "small" businesses was a dental office. More like 10
employees or so. (I did suggest that dentists would have special
expertise in bridging, but, when my reference was understood, people
threw pretzels at me).
Perhaps a distinguishing feature of a "small" business is that they
have NO professional network or system administrators. At best,
admin is a collateral duty for an employee who may or may not have
ANY training. My own dentist happens to be a technology enthusiast
who likes working with computers, but, at some point, he realizes
that time he spends doing administration is not time that can more
profitably be used for billable patient care.
My former internist was adept at getting his tie caught in the
printer. I helped him get established with a Mac using the children's
interface.
My cardiologist, on the other hand, has a deep interest in medical
information systems, and has a subspecialty in electrophysiology (and
good hardware and algorithm background). While his group probably
has <100 employees, they are extremely instrumentation-heavy and have
a professional IT group. They spend lots of money on support --
think of their potential liability if they didn't, and a
life-critical file got trashed. So while the cardiology group is
small in numbers of employees, it's at least medium in terms of
sophistication. They are starting to get into things like remote
imaging with ATM links and the like, using technologies we tend to
think of as large business.
>
>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.
But what if it's something like a home improvement center? Quite
likely to use a turnkey inventory control system, but, depending on
how the initial system was sold, may or may not have internal (or
contract) support staff.
Even large businesses may very consciously want to focus on "core
competences". I can think of several computer and network
manufacturers who outsource such things as help desks, server admin,
payroll, etc., for various financial reasons.
>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.
But the average SMB that's not in the IT business probably hasn't
thrown together a home grown solution. They don't have the staff to
know where to start. Even more dangerous is that they may have
people who know the components, but don't know how to make them
foolproof--or even worse, geniusproof.
>
>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.
I might have agreed until you said firewall. I'm far more likely to
recommend outsourcing security administration than network
administration. It's not that a firewall is necessarily hard to
configure, but it is hard to know what should go into the
configuration. Developing the security policy needs lots of
experience. At the day-to-day level, anyone who expects to run a
reasonably secure firewall needs to stay on top of the firewall,
CERT, etc., mailing lists. That takes time, time which a consultant
can amortize over multiple customers.
Routing is reasonably straightforward until you start getting into
high-availability, business critical functions, especially involving
the Internet or extranets.
>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.)
And outside computer science programs, very few people are literate
with UNIX shells--statistically speaking of the overall corporate
environment.
>
>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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