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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a major bandwidth crunch caused by guests wielding Slingboxes and other network devices that overran the hotel chain's outdated network.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.'"
It is a "horror story" because the network manager was not prepared for the customers to actually USE the service...
So what was the point of that article again? I must have missed it. Perhaps the PR flak who subbed it could explain it to me. I want that two minutes of my life back now /.
I just get this mental image I'm not going to be able to shake....
"Some call it a slingbox, I call it appleTV. nnnngggggghhhh"
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!
Alright! I know I'm in there! If I don't come out, I'll have to come in after me!
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."
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
Bruce Perens.
This seems like a thinly veiled ad for Marriot internet access.
...is that the worst threats to your network do not necessarily come from outside.... they almost always come from your very own moronic employees.
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.
Let's see... At a conference your computer is connected to hostile networks nearly all the time. Depending on the conference, there are potentially a LOT of people that know about 0-day exploits and might want to try something dumb.
I dunno. I can see your argument but there may be very good reasons to patch your system ASAP. I used to work in an environment where NOTHING got patched because they were afraid of fucking-up production services. I argued until I was blue in the face that we needed to do something and have a plan for deploying patches. I even went so far as to make proposals explaining the benefits, the risks, and the costs. No one would listen to me because I was a UNIX admin on a Windows team. Eventually I was let go and no one else took-up my cause (perhaps the cause was a large reason I was let go). No one on the team, except me, felt that there was any risk because the networks were "isolated" behind three layers of firewalls. About three months after I left some nasty work managed to find it's way into this "isolated" network and wreak much more havoc than we ever could have patching the damned servers.
I know that this isn't exactly the same thing as updating your laptop while on the road, but sometimes the updates are just worth the risk.
Perhaps the hotels should consider a caching proxy for just these sorts of events. Let the first user wait for the the download to come down the pipe and everyone else can leach from the proxy.