New job awesomeness

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

The new job is going swell. However, it seems I just can't escape the stupid (though I heard this one second hand - thank the gods).

One of the other netengs was recounting a conversation he had with someone in the NOC. They were discussing a NIC upgrade for a major applications server. The NOC guy had apparently been told by the systems guys that that it was a waste of time upgrading the server's network interface card to a 1Gb/s NIC because "our core network only has 100Mb/s of bandwidth anyway".

...yeah, this guy really believed that the core network for a multi-national corporation was designed so that it can only handle 100Mb/s of traffic at any one time.

We had a bloody good laugh at that one over lunch.

Comments

[vortex.livejournal.com]

He works in a NOC and believed that?!?!

Heck, they need to fire him and hire me, I've been looking for a NOC job for a year and a half...

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that a gigabit LAN is often more than just putting in gigabit switches. The cabling can be a real challenge for large LAN installations if you want to qualify the whole building LAN for gigabit. For a large installation, sometimes 100baseT can even be tricky to pull off if the budget for cabling installs is limited. It may just be that 100baseT was the best they could qualify the cabling for, and a gigabit NIC was overkill for that network connection. (Although I'd have to say the server room itself should have probably been wired for gigabit for inter-server connections, maybe with a 100bT connection to the outside LAN..)

And a 100baseT switch-based LAN is actually a pretty decent backbone even for major corporations. The call center I work in is qualified for 100baseT end to end ..

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

This isn't just a corporate LAN - this is a company with multiple sites (and stores) that passes dozens of gigabits of traffic per second. If you understood just how much traffic (and bandwidth) we have - something someone in our NOC really shouldn't be taking advice from a syseng on - you'd probably see the funny side. :]