Do you suffer from CINO?!?
Do you suffer from CINO?
When the network goes down, all eyes are on you. Downtime means lost business, lost revenue, more overtime, and lots of stress spread between you and all your stakeholders.
So, what can you do to reduce exposure to network downtime? Engineer the *perfect* setup. Here’s what we mean.
In an ideal world, you’d have 100% uptime. Even 99% uptime means there are still days when something in your network breaks down.
When you think about issues that trigger network downtime, there are obvious causes, like a natural disaster or power outage. Other common causes of network downtime include:
When it comes to making software updates within your access layer, the majority of network managers live by the motto, “If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t need fixing.” If your network equipment is in place and running and working as it should, updating software for the sake of updating software significantly increases your exposure to downtime.
There. We said it.
Network equipment is primarily solid-state. Once it’s working, it will continue to work until something fails. There’s a low failure rate on solid-state electronics. At Edgeium, we stress the ability to leave your software in place and run it until there is an issue — this way, everything is static. If you keep changing software, we guarantee it will break something upstream or downstream, and reverting changes = downtime.
We know we’ve been taught to keep systems up to date, but switches aren’t like the operating system on your PC. Constantly updating devices is downtime in itself with reboots and people on standby to make sure nothing fails.
Think about it this way: Even 20-year-old Catalyst 3550s are still functional.
Rather than reducing your network outages, let’s aim to avoid them altogether! The key to this is creating redundancies. Do you have a fallback if one of your systems fails? Do you also have spare equipment in the event of breakage?
These redundancies limit your downtime exposure to minutes rather than days.
Start by looking for points of failure and lack of redundancy points:
At Edgeium, the biggest value we offer is our experience and our ability to design networks around business requirements — not the latest and greatest technology.
For example, the best solution may be a previous-gen switch, not a new one. You can decide to purchase the latest switch and pay a premium, or you can buy two units from Edgeium and engineer a fully redundant solution. The key is having someone on the front end who can help architect a fully redundant network while reducing costs.
We have experience with most OEM channels and make suggestions based on business needs and the best fit, not simply the most recent items released from the OEM.
In addition to the latest and greatest, Edgeium provides secondary market hardware, which gives us the flexibility to design your network using previous-gen hardware if needed. Lastly, our CovrEDGE maintenance can save you 50%-60% annually compared to SMARTnet.
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