I'm in charge of IT for a few sites, one in Brighton the other just outside Edinburgh. Unfortunately, I've no budget - this is dealt with by our Business Manager - my immediate boss.

He's not an IT man and has to get any budget approval from a board of directors (or accountants to be honest).

Now I took over the networks about 2yrs ago and have spent almost feck all, but we've had some failures recently and I want to start replacing kit.

We have a couple of old Cisco Catalyst 1900 switches, but the main LAN runs on some cheap Allied Telesyn ones. Two of these have now failed (not bad for 3yrs) and I need to justify some new ones (not the fact that they're needed, just the costs).

Personally, I'd like to go for some Cisco or HP switches, but my boss has seen some Dynamode ones for around 1/3 of the price. The spec on paper looks OK (see here).

I've always used Cisco or Enterasys kit with companies who didn't really penny-pinch as much. How the heck do you sell a Cisco or HP switch at £400 over one @ just £90 when on paper they do the same job :confused:

Stefan

MTBF ?

It's hard to argue over 2 products without experience or proof that one is inferior to the other.
You obviously know you could incur problems with either makes.
I suppose you have to look at product support :
will they replace faulty equipment in given timescales;
what are their SLA's on the products for replacement.

A saving of £300 per unit could be eaten up in an hour or 2 of downtime, (maybe in minutes )
I think the support side of it may your only viable argument.

If you get your own way anyway, and things go wrong; it's you that gets the egg on the face. (I'll bet your boss will see to that)

Maybe you could use the "savings" they are making, elswhere in your dept ;)

As suggested above, work out the cost of no connectivity or google for an estimate and take it from there. Most companies are horrified when they work out how dependent they are on their comms stuff...

I've got 'cheap' unmanaged and managed Allied switches running at a number of sites. Run 24/7 with no agro for two to three years on some sites.

Do you need the extra features in a Cisco switch?

The extra features of a cisco or hp switch may be as much use as "tits on a boar" but the support that is available for them is the major differential, a 4 hour response from a cisco or HP engineer can pay for itself when put up against a next day swap out of some cheaper kit.

the reliablility is one angle, but I can think of the reponse - they're only £90. If one fails, we'll just buy a new one OR we could buy two spares just in case.

I think the biggest gripe I have is the lack of management. I've just spent the past 15 mins figuring out why half our network just stopped working and swapping out another Allied Telesyn switch.

Then it happened again, so I rebooted all the switches (including the two Cisco's) and it's working. Now I'm wondering if the 2 allied telesyn switches sitting on my desk are actually faulty.

So, from my viewpoint it's a nightmare diagnosing any faults without any management and simply swapping hardware can be done by any old monkey.

I suppose if the cheaper switch has decent port-management then paying more for just a brand name is never gonna win much arguments.

Stefan

How expensive is network downtime at your company? Can everyone function without network access? If you can get by for a couple of hours/days there is no way you will get them to spend the money but if the company grinds to a halt you have a chance. Is your backup run on similar lines to the network? If so I have a nice document that will scare the living C**p out of the powers that be, it maybe of use to illustrate the costs associated with downtime aswell. I'll drop it to you on the mail.

cheers,

that's what I'm after. 95% of users on our networks are contractors, so yes any downtime is costing the company big bucks.

Stefan

Allied offer optional Net.Cover plans on all their switches. Anything up to 24x7x4 (engineer to site) should you want it...

I avoid no-name switches myself (not to mention D-Link :eek:) though.

Doesn't your company offset the IT spend against tax? So the price is irrelevant. Get the better kit.

Use buzzwords such as traffic shaping, bandwidth throttling to a particular port/IP/MAC etc. as part of your sell :D Management love buzzwords.

have you spoke to you HP or Cisco account maanger? We often have to build business cases around justifying the cost of replacing older kit.

Usually it goes along the lines of:
- how much does down time cost the business
- what are the additional costs of the older kit, eg maintenance, staff skills, number of staff required to support that kit.
- take an approach towards consolidation, eg you spent/spend £150K per year on the overall cost of running the old kit, but you need less new kit to do the job and that comes in at say £100K. Therefore it pays for itself in 9 months

The issue you financial guy has is probably around depreciation. He still has (I would guess) 1 year of depreciation to account for. The book value of depriacitation would need to be added into the cost of new kit.

Phil