How Do You Keep Up with Enterprise-level Tech?

E1ven asks: "I'm curious how the Slashdot gang chooses to keep up with the performance of high-level equipment for servers, routers, loadbalancing, and the like? For PC-type specs it's easy, every guy and his dog has a review website, and magazines stuff themselves in every window. However, the higher-end equipment is far more difficult to find trustworthy analysis of. I'm curious how other people have solved this problem, and what resources they use to keep on top of the game?"

Comments

Re:Well, lets see...

[Sai Babu]

In the ideal world one would decide what is needed to do the job, send out a mess of RFQ's with appropriate penalties for 'failure to perform' in all categories of import (including timely delivery), and let the vendors figure out how to meet your needs.

Of course, it's more work to detail requirements than to WAG hardware that has enough oomph to CYA. It's less fun researching than hitting a 3 martini lunch and maybe a weekend of golf and strip clubs with the vendors.

In the end, you can have the best of both worlds (no work and a good system) via strategic relationships. Once you've established with a strong sales guy at the vendors, it's as much in his interest as it is in yours to keep your bosses happy. It takes a good bit of money flow to keep this relationship going, but in the end may still prove to be the least expensive approach, depending on your 'people skills'. This is often what is really going on when upper management who doesn't have a clue abotu the details ends up directing the deal toward a specific vendor, time and time again.

They don't teach this at Harvard or MIT

benchmark

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Not always available or appropriate, but you do your research and take the plunge--but before you put all 20,000 users on the chosen solution, you try it out with 100 and then scale it up as it is proved.

The problem with this is that some products are only available to WAN type solutions, so it's either 20,000 users or none. For those, it's naturally more difficult; who do you ask about how the thing is going to work? How many other institutions use the exact product you're investigating, in an environment that's analogous to yours, who also isn't a competitor and therefore not willing to reveal their competitive advantages?

For those, I'd say: do your research as others above have suggested, but then it comes down to nailing the vendor on deliverables--what are the consequences of the product not performing as promised? Rebate, return, free upgrade to the bug-squished version? And support contracts--how much support time does the solution come with to make it work as advertised?

If anyone who wants to sell to the Enterprise isn't willing to give you both written guarantees as to performance--and consequences for failing to perform--as well as some support, they're not really ready to be an Enterprise vendor. That's part of what that $1M buys you.

Re:Simple

[jaredcat]

I know that was intended as a joke, but seriously, thats what I end up doing half the time :(.

If I am buying a $1 million dollar software package from some vendor, and they tell me it absolutely has to run on one of these 1 models of Sun servers (2 of them discontinued models and 1 of them $250k new), who am I to argue? If the software ever doesn't do something it was supposed to do they would always come back with "well its only tested on this particular machine so we can't support you."

Very frustrating...

Evaluate them yourself for *your* environment

[venom600]

Typically in an enterprise environment you have pretty specific requirements based on the hardware that you've already got. Most vendors understand this and will get you an evaluation unit or license to try the hardware out in your own environment or a test environment that you've set up. We've done this with every major piece of hardware we've ever bought from a list of fairly major players including:

• EMC - Symmetrix and Celerra
• Network Appliance - NAS filers
• Cisco - switches, routers, firewalls and software
• Dell - blade servers
• IBM - 64-bit servers
• SourceFire - Sensors and software
• F5 - load balancers
• Apple- XServe RAID
• Netscalar - load balancers
• the list goes on and on....

The point is that they'll let you take a fairly in-depth look 'under the hood' before you buy. I mean, you pay enough for these boxes/software that if they didn't they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

As far as knowing which vendors to evaluate, we stay up to date by reading Slashdot :), magazine ads, recommendations from other 'like-minded' people at conferences, Google. We've found a few smaller vendors through-out the years that we've had great experiences with too...most of these were either found through Google, or they came knocking on our door looking for business.

Enterprise level?

[sysadmn]

Easy, I just drop a hint that I might be purchasing something, and the vendor's account rep buys me lunch and tells me how good his product is, and all the competitor's faults. After a week of free lunches, I announce the project has been put on hold. Then repeat the process next month, using what you learned the previous month. I've gained 10 pounds this year! Of course, it helps to work for a Fortune 5 company. Not only do you have a sales team, and sales engineering team, there's usually a vendor VP assigned to manage the relationship between your company and theirs. And those guys have really big expense accounts. I don't have to use the

<tongue-in-cheek>

tag, do I?