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a major bandwidth crunch caused by guests wielding Slingboxes and other network devices that overran the hotel chain's outdated network.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

Where's the horror?

[SilverJets]

Marriott has a network and customers use it. Marriott realizes the network is overwhelmed by the customer use and is now upgrading it.

So where's the horror? Or is this just Marriott's way of advertising their new network?

Re:Where's the horror?

[luvirini]

It is a "horror story" because the network manager was not prepared for the customers to actually USE the service...

Re:Where's the horror?

[Kyojin]

Whoever modded this "insightful" needs to get a clue. The article doesn't even have 3 pages, it has 2. Also the only mention of "Linux" is in the ads around the story, not in either of the two pages of the story.

One lesson from the article...

[BrowserCapsGuy]

There needs to be better coordination between marketing and IT. IT had no idea marketing was running commercials showing customers using all this high-bandwidth stuff so there's no way IT could be prepared for it. Imagine 160 customers just trying to view websites on one DSL line! I admire this guy for his honesty if nothing else. He'll probably catch hell for it from his superiors!

Re:One lesson from the article...

[timmarhy]

that's what marketing do dumby! they make outrageous claims then handball it to technical, and when technical can't make the impossible happen marketing make it look like the techies failed. marketing will then tweak their bullshit slightly to cover their own ass's and make it look like they saved the day.

Re:One lesson from the article...

[Kjella]

that's what marketing do dumby! they make outrageous claims then handball it to technical, and when technical can't make the impossible happen marketing make it look like the techies failed. marketing will then tweak their bullshit slightly to cover their own ass's and make it look like they saved the day

Marketing aren't half bad, they haven't got a clue what they're talking about and answer "yes" to most questions when they have no idea or not. Most have a fairly relaxed attitude to that and know that their job is to reel them in close so negotiations can start. They're great with powerpoints and talking points and all that, but noone would mistake them from a tech and particularly not a tech genius. That's why they usually only able to do limited damange, because the customers also want a more technical presentation.

The real bastards work in presales. The presales guys are very bright and very much so techs, but they have joined the dark side. Their domain are one of mock-ups, sales demonstrations and in no small part smoke and mirrors. They deal in hardcoded values and links, functionality that doesn't exist or doesn't work and graciously ignores all the difficulties of actually doing it. They're the people who *know* it won't work and still tell the customer they can do it and the customer will believe them. They're experts at closing sales, to then hand it over to an implementation team because clearly they're too important to actually do the impossible.

I actually have a better relationship to people that are a bit wishy-washy and hand-waving than those who know exactly what they're talking about - then lie about it.

This is more typical than horrifying to me...

[kungfoolery]

The business units of most organizations typically make promises to their customers without comprehending or even considering the IT implications. Account Executive to customer: "Sure! We can provide you and your thousands of users seamless B2B connections from your network to ours wirelessly from any global location!" Account Executive to IT department: "Ok, you guys figure out how to do that."

Re:This is more typical than horrifying to me...

[jd]

Yep, seen that at plenty of places. At one place, the IT department clearly spelled out what was possible and in what timeframe. Marketing oversold anyway. However, this isn't just IT, and that's the scary part of it. Airlines routinely overbook aircraft. Package holiday companies sell hotel rooms for hotels that haven't yet been built. You too can place advance orders for books that haven't been written or buy computers that have not yet been built. (One company I know has made substantial money off a computer for which even the prototype does not yet work.)

The problem with marketing is that it is not about selling what you have, it's about selling what the person wants to buy. If there's a discrepancy between the two, well, that's not your department. Complaints is three doors down, across the hall from Abuse.

Re:hurm?

[WarlockD]

Agreed. Whats the freaking point? The article is a fluff piece as it doesn't even describe what, if any, the problems they had to overcome. I rather have it explain WHY the hotel customer network was safer than there internal network than just it be said:P

Marriott a sponsor of Slashdot?

Unrealistic convergence plan

[Bruce Perens]

Placing all access points in a single telecom closet for what are generally rather spacious properties requires that 2.4 GHz signals be carried through coaxial cable that is very lossy at that frequency - it might be fair to expect up to 90% of the signal to be lost in the wire. There is an FCC limit on the transmitted power, and even if you manage to boost that at the antenna you will be boosting noise as well. And this attenuation and noise will of course hurt receiving too. This is in general going to result in lower wireless quality than desired, much lower than possible.

Instead, get zero-management access points that do not do NAT, routing, etc, and treat them just like antennas once you set the SSID. Do the protocol processing in the telecom closet with a higher grade of hardware than consumer equipment. Cache DNS and web transfers there. Work with Slingbox to engineer channel aggregation with multicasting that bypasses the home units while transmitting the same programming, because so many of those folks are watching the same sports game. I can think of some interesting approaches to the possible legal issues with Slingbox aggregating channels, no doubt they can as well. Can an in-house video alternative be made as attractive as Slingbox? That's another solution.

Bruce

Astroturf?

[UESMark]

This seems like a thinly veiled ad for Marriot internet access.

Biggest lesson learned......

[Nick Driver]

...is that the worst threats to your network do not necessarily come from outside.... they almost always come from your very own moronic employees.

Re:The Horror

[eln]

Sounds like a lack of capacity planning. If the marketroids were planning a huge marketing push, the IT manager should have been given the resources to increase network capacity prior to that push. If the IT manager was given proper warning and funding prior to the marketing campaign, it's his fault for not effectively utilizing it. Either way, the problem could have been avoided with proper management.

Re:Microsoft update + Public Network = Instant DOS

[imac.usr]

What kind of fucking idiot updates their laptop during a conference? You wait to do that shit until you get back home in case it screws your machine.