Marriott IT Exec Shares Network Horror Story 98
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a major bandwidth crunch caused by guests wielding Slingboxes and other network devices that overran the hotel chain's outdated network.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.'"
Where's the horror? (Score:1, Insightful)
So where's the horror? Or is this just Marriott's way of advertising their new network?
Re:Where's the horror? (Score:5, Insightful)
One lesson from the article... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is more typical than horrifying to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hurm? (Score:5, Insightful)
Marriott a sponsor of Slashdot?
Re:One lesson from the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unrealistic convergence plan (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:This is more typical than horrifying to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Astroturf? (Score:5, Insightful)
Biggest lesson learned...... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where's the horror? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Horror (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One lesson from the article... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Microsoft update + Public Network = Instant DOS (Score:3, Insightful)