Tag Archives: STRATEGIC

Episode 11 – Infrastructure Lifecycle

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We returned to record our eleventh episode on Sunday August 28, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

Roundtable Discussion – Infrastructure Lifecycle

 

Reasons for a refresh?

  • End of Life (EoL)
  • End of Support (EoS)
  • Performance
  • Expansion
  • Budgeting (new equipment might be less costly than maintaining older equipment under maintenance contracts)
  • New features requirement (PoE+ vs PoE / 10Gbps vs 1Gbps / 1Gbps vs 100Mbps)
  • Manageability

Strategic Lifecycle Planning – often companies plan and budget to replace their infrastructure every 5 – 7 years.

What kind of refresh ?

  • The easy one; 1:1 like e.g. one core switch for a newer cores witch
  • Technology change; like e.g. from classic STP to multi chassis link aggregation
  • Fabrics
  • Software Defined Networking

You can really stretch the budget by looking at second hand equipment, especially for non-critical sections of the infrastructure. Avoid grey market equipment and only work with a reputable vendor.

 

Reach out for the Vendors:

  • Educate yourself before the vendors show up
  • Compare different vendors and technologies with each other
  • Document the features that you are looking for in the solution
  • Proof of Concept – prove out the possible solution
  • Rollout Planning
  • Maintenance window – new product gets implemented to the production environment
  • Finger crossed (look for bugs)

What tools are you using?

Synergy – Synergy combines your desktop devices together into one cohesive experience. It’s software for sharing your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s only $10 for the basic version and well worth the money in Dominik’s opinion.

Michael’s technical challenge?

T460-heroThese past two weeks I’ve been working to figure out why the Lenovo ThinkPad T460 w/Intel AC 8260 wireless adapter wasn’t playing well with a Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controller and Cisco 1262N and 3702E Access Points. The device itself is pretty nice… very thin, not very heavy, great keyboard and doubles as a tablet. I’ll be sad to give it up when I figure out what’s broken. Watch my blog for a follow-up and possible conclusion.

Update: August 30, 2016 – workaround is to enable A-MPDU for 802.11n – Lenovo ThinkPad T460 Yoga with Intel AC 8260 Wireless Issues

Cheers!