I referenced LAN rooms as an expedient and to highlight an irony. The point is,
smaller, less-concentrated, distributed enclosures suffice nicely for many
purposes, similar to how Google's distributed containers and Sun Micro's Data
Centers in a box do. And while LAN rooms that have been vacated, as a result of
using collapsed fiber, might fit these needs, since they would have been already
powered and conditioned in many cases, those could actually be reclaimed by
tenants and landlords as usable floor space in many cases.
I suppose the maintenance industry would love the surge in extra
contracts to keep all the gear running....
Your supposition is open to wide interpretation. I'll take it to mean that you
think "more" gear, not less, will require maintenance. Maybe in some cases, but
in the vast majority not.
Consider a multi-story commercial building that is entirely devoid of UTP-based
switches, but instead is supported over fiber to a colo or managed service
provider location. Why would this building require L2/3 aggregation switches and
routers, simply to get in and out, if it hasn't any access switches inside? It
wouldn't require any routers, is my point. This reduces the number of boxes
reqired by a factor of two or more, since I no longer require routers onsite, and
I no longer require their mates in the upstream or colos. I wouldn't require a
classical in-building L3 hierarchy employing high-end routers at the distribution
and core levels at all, or I'd require a lot fewer of them. Extending this
rationale further, the level of logistics and LAN element administration required
to keep on-prem applications humming is also reduced, ir not eliminated, and/or
could easily be sourced more efficiently elsewhere. I.e., from a CLI or Web
browser the LAN admin could be doing her thing from Mumbai (and in some cases
this is already being done) or from home. So there's actually "less" gear to
manage, not more.
I realize this isn't a one-size-fits all model, and I didn't intend to make it
appear that it was. But for the vast majority of enterprise buildings with
tenants occupying large contiguous areas, I think it makes a great deal of sense,
or at least would be worth evaluating to determine if it does.
Frank A. Coluccio
DTI Consulting Inc.
212-587-8150 Office
347-526-6788 Mobile
On Sat Mar 29 18:30 , david raistrick sent: