Network Graduation
Today is a proud day for me, personally.
I started this company barely knowing what a router was. Heck, I didn’t need to… I sold web hosting!
The company grew and my market evolved. People wanted to host entire machines, not just web-sites. I knew a switch took one uplink and turned it in to many, so, there we go, problem solved!
With a nice little (very little) collection of customers, imagine my surprise when for no reason whatsoever my customers were unable to access their sites. I ran to the datacenter, fearing the worst… Cabinet is on fire, rabid dogs overtook Westin security and chewed through power cables, someone opened the window because it was hot, etc. When I arrived, everything was fine. The servers were up, my switch was up; why is this happening?
The answer of course is that my upstream provider had failed. Not only had they failed, but apparently their lead network engineer had just quit and he was the only one with the enable (think ‘Administrator’ or ‘root’) password to their routers, so, I was dead in the water until they tracked him down and asked him if he could pretty please provide the enable password so they could actually log in to fix the issue.
I remember trying to think of a way to communicate this to my customers without sounding like an idiot. I also remember not coming up with one. It was that day that I vowed this would never happen again; time to learn what a router is.
While we were certainly a small company at the time, we did have an immediate need to remedy this situation. Budget did not allow for simply ‘throwing money at the problem’ so we had to get resourceful. After much searching we ended up with two Cisco 3745 routers coupled to two Cisco 3750 switches in a redundant, fully meshed configuration. Once that was in place, you can bet that the very next thing we did was to procure another provider so that an outage like this would never happen again.
Well, fast forward to today… To this point, the old 3745s and 3750s have run things famously; powering two datacenters worth of equipment, BGP sessions to large customers, peering sessions with just about everyone in the Seattle Internet Exchange, and months (actually over a year, I think) of consistent stability.
I will be forever proud of what we accomplished with this gear, but there always comes a time to let go.
I have a sort of ‘unspoken’ methodology I follow both in life and in business; if you aren’t going for the best, then you are just wasting <time|money|effort> that would be better spent just getting what you really want in the first place.
Yes, it would be ‘cheaper’ for Adtaq to run Netgear switches… Customers might not notice, everything might be fine… But, would it be ‘the best’? When they overheat and lock-up, would it still have been a good decision? When the lack of VLANs create broadcast traffic that drives customer’s bandwidth bills up artificially higher than they should be, would it still look like a good decision?
We waited until the time was right and then went all out.
Tonight, March 7th, 2008, marks our network’s graduation.
Stay tuned for details.