Vendor redundancy

Today's corporate network infrastructure is a vital enabler for the enterprise. It creates operational efficiencies, supports mission-critical applications and is responsible for most productivity increases.

This infrastructure, the foundation of the business and its present and future initiatives, must be able to grow, evolve and even 'morph' into a platform that's ideally aligned with the business strategy and its requirements going forward.

This dynamic is at odds with the age-old 'safe' strategy of employing a single vendor to address all aspects of the network, from core to edge. This strategy has seen end-users being led blindly down a path of conformity - marching to the vendor's drum and having to settle for what one provider has to offer, be it good, bad or mediocre in terms of network performance.

This single-vendor vision is often distorted by product portfolio constraints and blinded to obvious inefficiencies in selected areas of the network.

For example, a single vendor with a broad product line-up will almost certainly have products that lag behind those of a competitor for any number of reasons, including out-of-sync product life cycles, changes in design focus, and even human resource allocation at the plant.

Significantly, many vendors who claim to provide 'everything' for the enterprise network to meet its technology requirements have actually built their all-encompassing solutions with products that often weren't designed to be compatible, gained through corporate acquisitions.

Today, with the imminent merger and consolidation of many industry vendor interests, it is more important than ever to accurately and successfully align the enterprise infrastructure vendor strategy with business requirements.

A multi‐vendor strategy actually promotes cost savings.

Andy Robb is chief technology officer at Duxbury Networking.

This requires the freedom of choice that comes with a multi-vendor strategy. Vendor diversity allows the solutions that best meet the (often unique) needs of individual businesses to be employed. These solutions will be based on open standards, not closed, proprietary standards designed by unscrupulous vendors to 'lock' their customers into their particular product line and often narrow-focused solution strategy.

Freedom of choice or, more succinctly, the freedom to choose vendors based on their best-of-breed offerings and innovations, is central to the creation and maintenance of a competitive business advantage.

The time, therefore, has come for end-users to practise vendor redundancy in a bid to ensure business imperatives - and not sales pitches - orchestrate the evolution of their networks.

A vendor redundancy strategy also mitigates risk by limiting an organisation's exposure to a single vendor's decisions, which often include random price hikes, mandatory upgrade programmes, costly compulsory support programmes and unreasonable product rationalisations.

A multi‐vendor strategy actually promotes cost savings. It's an opportunity to reduce capital expenditure on network investments by 20%-35%, according to Gartner's vendor influence curve research. In fact, the research giant estimates that companies in the US are wasting $15 billion per year sole-sourcing their networks.

Along with vendor redundancy and a multi-vendor strategy comes the concept of 'dissimilarity' or system diversity.

This is a strategy designed to prevent failures common to a particular product line or brand. Industry watchers often highlight this case in point; the Blaster Worm vulnerability in each and every Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP system - before a patch could be rushed to market to cure the problem.

The premise that diverse systems are inherently stronger than homogeneous ones - since the common flaw is obviated - is clearly illustrated in the aerospace industry where Boeing introduced triple redundancy to its fly-by-wire flight control systems on its 777 model. Triple redundancy is not unique in this sector, but when combined with system diversity, it set new standards for flight safety - and vendor redundancy.

Boeing specified three separate computer architectures, three different microprocessors and three different software compilers from three different vendors for each of the 'plane's three, fully redundant control systems.

Boeing went further by introducing three different 'clean rooms' to assemble the systems and then located the systems in separate parts of the aircraft.

Today, organisations should take a leaf out of the Boeing build manual and realise that no single vendor is able to fully grasp a business' needs, its requirements for the future and strategic direction in getting there.

In addition, a single vendor with a diverse and varied product line-up, with many brands acquired through mergers and acquisitions, is unlikely to be in the best position to support all equally well, as its expertise is most likely to be spread thinly throughout the support team.

Vendor diversity gives organisations the ability to control their decision-making processes, remain at the helm of their network infrastructure and make instant, informed choices on strategic direction based on actual business drivers and economic climate changes - not a vendor's sales target.