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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

Probably going against the grain here, but what about the operations staff who are charged with supporting these 1,164 routers? What about warranties and parts replacements? There is a price for standardizing on a piece of hardware at such a large scale. When you standardize, sure there is going to be hardware overkill in some places, but in the big picture this is just a price of doing business at this scale. What is the price of service calls out to this location when the hardware is down? You have a tool-chain that supports this hardware, you have experts supporting the network (security, patching, etc), and you have contracts in place to make sure it is operational.

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Decent point.

If you have 5 office buildings with 50-500-500-500-2000 people in them (respectively), then standardising is probably a good idea since now you can use the same company to fix problems in all the builds and not have to take special care with the small building.

However. If you have 30 builds with 5 people in each. Sending a new, preconfigure, router by fedex is so much cheaper.

That is how my phone company treats me. If my home router dies, or has an odd problem that they can't figure. They just send me a new router by mail and I switch it out with the old one and send that one back.

Nothing wrong with standardizing, so standardize on a $100-$500 router instead of a $20,000 router. The point is that some guy made a killing selling gear only a place with 10,000 users needs.

I am one of those charged with maintaining this equipment. Spread throughout our state, there are 8 Education Services Agencies that manage their region's networks. I personally installed ~115 of these routers...

What's the price? Not a lot.

We are state employees, and as such, are paid state employee wages. I am compensated for mileage, but beyond that, there is no charge to the individual districts. Part of the cost of these routers was a 4 year Cisco Smart Care plan which replaces the hardware within 24 hours at no additional cost. What that really means is, they ship it to me and it's my responsibility to replace and return the failed part. Much of what I do is remote configuration changes and very little on-site time.

There's a point in standardizing, but they probably should have standardized on 2-3 different branch router products, vs. one.

Yeah, I agree. I'm just saying I can kind of see where they are coming from.

Who, Cisco? I wouldn't be excusing their actions in a hurry.

Everyone in this deal should be advising as though they are spending their own money. You can spend a lot of money, but would you if it were you own and you had other things to consider in a budget?

Cisco was acting in their own commercial interest, which would be fine if their counterparty weren't either corrupt or incompetent.

It's reasonable for an enterprise deployment to try to standardize on some components, which costs something in size-inefficiency. It's ok to spec a 2-5x bigger product for some sites if most other sites are bigger, and if the big/small products are wildly different, etc. But that's clearly not the case here.

Arguably the state should have had in-house competence to spend money on the taxpayer's behalf, or should have engaged a contractor with fiduciary responsibility to design/spec the work (and excluded from bidding).

Do they get a bonus or other benefit if they act as if they are spending their own money, or alternatively, punished if they do not act as such?

In other words: if there's no incentive, what difference does it make?

I'm saying they should. Not that they will.

That's a hypothetical that so far as I'm aware is not reflective of reality.

Thanks! Nice job at sowing seeds of doubt when faced with with clearly damning evidence of incompetence. You clearly have a brilliant future in government procurement.

Next task: make the case standardizing on Ferrari 599s for all government vehicles. All of you arguments will hold in that cases as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_599_GTB_Fiorano

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