Marriott IT Exec Shares Network Horror Story

alphadogg writes "Neil Schubert is only partly kidding when he calls Marriott International's move toward a converged network a horror story. 'I'm here to tell you a terrifying tale of network design, support and administration,' he said at an IT conference in Boston, referring to a major bandwidth crunch caused by guests wielding Slingboxes and other network devices that overran the hotel chain's outdated network. 'One of the things we've learned about our guest networks is we have one of the most foreign, hostile environments known to man in the network administration world ... I can take 100,000 customers a night on that infrastructure and we actually have less incidents of harm than we do on our corporate back-office infrastructure.'"

Comments

Re:Unrealistic convergence plan

[Leto-II]

Slingbox is not P2P at all. You stream content from your computer back home to wherever you want to watch it.

Re:Unrealistic convergence plan

[Franso6]

In that definition everything that's unicast is Peer to Peer.
The term is nowadays used for a form of content distribution that's based on using end-user-owned, non-specialised machines working collectively.
What you're referring to is a client-server model.. Usually considered as more or less the opposite of a P2P model.
I agree that the naming peer to peer is unfortunate, though.

Re:Come on!

[edittard]

Can't an "Editor" graft in peace?

In some parts of England, "graft" means hard work rather than the modern American meaning relating to corruption. This could easily lead to confusion and ambiguity, and yet in this case it doesn't. Puzzling, most puzzling.

Re:hurm?

[Midnight Thunder]

One of the points was that their current network implementation sucked. They have multiple networks, each handling a different type of medium, be it telephone, computer data and TV. This makes for huge complexity when administering the networks. Their current data network was not designed in an optimal manner and quickly got over run. Their plan is to provide one IP network for all data types (voice, fax, data and TV), instead of dedicated networks, and then have a box in each room which would provide an interface to allow to use phone, computers and TVs. This approach reduces cabling and makes it much easier to manage.

BTW The article could have been written better.

Re:Unrealistic convergence plan

[Bruce Perens]

I wasn't talking about leaky coax, but TV coax - RG-6, -57, -59, etc. Some of the "antenna distribution systems" not only use that, they might even use the same wire that is used to distribute television around the building. Obviously a solution that does not require wire pulling is attractive to these properties, that's why so many of the hotel-room wired Ethernet devices are really a sort of short-haul DSL piggybacked on the room phone line. I bet they feed the WAPs with that pseudo-DSL, too.

When you said "zero-managment access points", were you referring to Cisco's LWAPP architecture

Cisco has a nice product in this niche, maybe with better reliability than consumer equipment and maybe that is worth the price. But most consumer equipment can be put into "LAN Bridge Mode" and would achieve the same thing.

Thanks

Bruce