Pros/Cons Dual Best Effort ISP vs Fiber/MPLS.
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The thing about a cell tower outage is that nearly all people just see it as a "gap in coverage." It's not like losing a terrestrial line, it appears very differently to the end users.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The thing about a cell tower outage is that nearly all people just see it as a "gap in coverage." It's not like losing a terrestrial line, it appears very differently to the end users.
But not to a non-mobile secondary link. In that case it would be considered down. Although as you said, generally ISPs and cell service don't go down at the same time.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I really don't think most business need dual links. These days a good ISP rarely goes down when it's not planned. The only reason we had it at the town was because of the police department there are things they need in an emergency, information on past crimes as well as facebook (which they can only get their special access to inside the network) Facebook is become more valuable that most people realize in detective work and active shooter situations.
I was thinking this as well. If there was a good wireless provider in the area get a 4G/3G modem in the mix as failover and you eliminate most ISP related downtime. I rarely hear of cell towers going "down".
They do, but one of the great things is they tend to go down from completely different events than land lines tend to go down from.
A lot of cell towers around here aren't running generator backups so they go down often.
Ouch, that could be an issue for sure.
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The thing about a cell tower outage is that nearly all people just see it as a "gap in coverage." It's not like losing a terrestrial line, it appears very differently to the end users.
But not to a non-mobile secondary link. In that case it would be considered down. Although as you said, generally ISPs and cell service don't go down at the same time.
Still depends, coverage varies all the time and an outage of a tower might only look like a drop in quality.
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I just had an interesting conversation at lunch.
So far, pretty much everyone here (as far as I can tell) have considered my idea of dumping the expensive fiber line and getting two commodity ISP links as a general good move. Of course a few of you have said something to the effect - prove to me that not being down is worth the extra costs - and I'm understanding that.
So, in my lunch conversation, and PSX will love this, my associates told me I was looking at it all wrong (granted you all have to, just for different reasons). To them the fact that I am even considering getting rid of the fiber connection is unthinkable. Why in god's name would I get rid of a pipe that has proven itself (yes I read your post Scott) so reliable. Instead of getting rid of that, if down time is really an issue, or as it appears, additional bandwidth is needed/desired, but the cheap best effort connection in addition to your current fiber connection, route your EHR and SIP traffic through that (with failover to the best effort) and push everything else off to the other pipe.
So instead of saving my company nearly $600/month, raise my price by $200.
Thoughts?
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@Dashrender said:
So instead of saving my company nearly $600/month, raise my price by $200.
Thoughts?
If that's what the uppers want I'd just do it assuming you presented the case well.
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@Dashrender said:
I just had an interesting conversation at lunch.
So far, pretty much everyone here (as far as I can tell) have considered my idea of dumping the expensive fiber line and getting two commodity ISP links as a general good move. Of course a few of you have said something to the effect - prove to me that not being down is worth the extra costs - and I'm understanding that.
So, in my lunch conversation, and PSX will love this, my associates told me I was looking at it all wrong (granted you all have to, just for different reasons). To them the fact that I am even considering getting rid of the fiber connection is unthinkable. Why in god's name would I get rid of a pipe that has proven itself (yes I read your post Scott) so reliable. Instead of getting rid of that, if down time is really an issue, or as it appears, additional bandwidth is needed/desired, but the cheap best effort connection in addition to your current fiber connection, route your EHR and SIP traffic through that (with failover to the best effort) and push everything else off to the other pipe.
So instead of saving my company nearly $600/month, raise my price by $200.
Thoughts?
Basically it's a conversation in a bubble. Like everything else, his recommendation is worthless without the financial data. Is spending $200 worth it for the additional speed? I can't answer that.
The thing that you proposed was lower risk, higher speed, lower cost. Win / Win / Win regardless of other financial details. It was a "guaranteed" improvement. Maybe not the best decision, but a known move in the right direction regardless of what factors matter to the business.
What this guy is proposing is faster and more reliable but much more costly. So Win / Win / Loss.
Which is better, a pure win? Or a tradeoff where you don't know which factors are the ones that matter? If only cost really matters, you might be screwing the company. If intense reliability doesn't matter, you'd be screwing the company.
So honestly, I think he's being reckless and illogical - just throwing away money because he's using emotion, not logic, to deal with the ambiguity of not having the details necessary for you to do your decision making.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
So instead of saving my company nearly $600/month, raise my price by $200.
Thoughts?
If that's what the uppers want I'd just do it assuming you presented the case well.
It was an associate. I doubt it was an upper.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
So instead of saving my company nearly $600/month, raise my price by $200.
Thoughts?
If that's what the uppers want I'd just do it assuming you presented the case well.
Lunch was with friends, not management - I see their (my friend's) point, and if management signs off GREAT! but since I already made the mistake of talking to my boss after the possibility of lower costs... this will be an unpleasant conversation to say the least.
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Most of us (I think) see the lower cost + faster internet + the added benefit of failover / redundancy for your ISP as a win though...
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@scottalanmiller said:
So honestly, I think he's being reckless and illogical - just throwing away money because he's using emotion, not logic, to deal with the ambiguity of not having the details necessary for you to do your decision making.
Details only for the sake of conversation were as follows,
Company looses $1000/hr of downtime (all other loses are actually deferred income, because they would be rescheduled).
Company grosses 12 million a year, employees 80 people. The save of $8600/year moving to pure commodity is but a blip on that radar, and 'to them' isn't worth the potential risk by moving to a pure commodity setup. -
@scottalanmiller said:
What this guy is proposing is faster and more reliable but much more costly. So Win / Win / Loss.
Their believe is that the reliability is so much greater than the commodity setup that the extra cost compared to our spend on things like employee salaries, health insurance, malpractice insurance, etc.. that the $8600 a year isn't worth the added risk.
I'm just not sure I can make that jump with them... again, soft science, so it's pretty hard to really know.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
So honestly, I think he's being reckless and illogical - just throwing away money because he's using emotion, not logic, to deal with the ambiguity of not having the details necessary for you to do your decision making.
Details only for the sake of conversation were as follows,
Company looses $1000/hr of downtime (all other loses are actually deferred income, because they would be rescheduled).
Company grosses 12 million a year, employees 80 people. The save of $8600/year moving to pure commodity is but a blip on that radar, and 'to them' isn't worth the potential risk by moving to a pure commodity setup.Wait... so $12,000 lost on the "commodity" connection, which is really only 12 hours over 7 years or less than two hours a year. You are looking at ~$2,000 of downtime a year vs the additional ~$8,000 of the cost of the reliable line? Just trying to make sure I understand.
Edit: Maths
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@Dashrender said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
So instead of saving my company nearly $600/month, raise my price by $200.
Thoughts?
If that's what the uppers want I'd just do it assuming you presented the case well.
Lunch was with friends, not management - I see their (my friend's) point, and if management signs off GREAT! but since I already made the mistake of talking to my boss after the possibility of lower costs... this will be an unpleasant conversation to say the least.
Why have it? What's the business reason for suggesting this?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
So honestly, I think he's being reckless and illogical - just throwing away money because he's using emotion, not logic, to deal with the ambiguity of not having the details necessary for you to do your decision making.
Details only for the sake of conversation were as follows,
Company looses $1000/hr of downtime (all other loses are actually deferred income, because they would be rescheduled).
Company grosses 12 million a year, employees 80 people. The save of $8600/year moving to pure commodity is but a blip on that radar, and 'to them' isn't worth the potential risk by moving to a pure commodity setup.Is $1K/hr a realistic loss number of just a WAG?
$8,600/year means you are betting that a dual commodity setup, which by all logic should destroy the current setup in uptime, will, against all reason, logic and observation, be down for 8.6 hours longer than the fiber line.
That's a pretty big bet to make against all of the facts and common sense. There is no reason to make that bet, but really strong reasons not to. Why would you set nearly ten grand on fire based on a wild hunch that logic, observation, history and common sense. It's like betting your life that the seat belt is more dangerous and so not wearing it because you are convinced the seat belt will be what kills you.
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@Dashrender said:
Their believe is that the reliability is so much greater ......
And they provided what logic to support this belief?
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@Dashrender said:
I'm just not sure I can make that jump with them... again, soft science, so it's pretty hard to really know.
Soft science is one thing. Completely disbelieving math is quite another.
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@Dashrender said:
I know that on average we have 3 outages a year at each remote location, so assuming that to be the case, I hope and anticipate that to be what happens in the future. So now I consider options to mitigate those 3 failures, which is the purchase of a second line.
In this quote you list three outages per year as an average. But you did not list the length of those outages. Fifteen minutes or a full day are wildly different.
And remember that two overlapping services should reduce the outages by something like 10,000:1.
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I'm not saying that the expensive fiber plus cable option is the wrong decision, I'm simply saying that the numbers provided don't add up to that. If $1K/hr of downtime is the real cost, that does not make the fiber line a good idea. The fiber has to save you from nearly one hour every month compared to the two commodity lines to pay for itself. And that's assuming that the slower speeds won't incur you any lost value (maybe they won't, so I can't add in that number.)
But given the factors that you have presented here, the fiber line is clearly ruled out as part of the equation from a business / technology / finance perspective. Only an emotion or political reason would justify it.
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Dual lines are a bit like RAID 1. If you think about a single super high reliability SAS drive (you know, the $1,000 a drive kind) and you ran with no RAID, you would expect data loss about once every six to eight years. Just how things are. You might get lucky and make it fifteen years, you might be unlucky and lose data in a week. But you would be very normal to get six to eight years.
But if you went to RAID 1 and moved to commodity drives (WD Red or even Green) for $250 total, you would expect to get more than 160,000 years before experiencing data loss.
Because when you are dealing with redundancy of this type, where the frequency of failure is incredibly low and you have unconnected, overlapping coverage, the chances of both things failing at the same time before the first one that failed is repaired, the risks drop by a staggering degree.
And unlike the RAID scenario where any overlap equals full failure, the WAN scenario allows for soft mitigation where even in the unlikely event of an overlap, the redundancy would reduce the length of the outage by some unknown amount.
