How being busy can lead to buying a lot of network gear …
June 27, 2007 by Urvish Vashi, Product Management in Marketing
I was recently reminded of an old friend from India who moved to California a year back or so for a new gig as the networking guy at a mid-sized company. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just call him Raj (note: names have been changed to protect the innocent). As are most people starting a new job, he was eager to make a strong first impression by doing all the standard stuff really well, and he wanted to be responsive to any end-user request, especially anything coming from his new boss. On his first day, he was invited to a senior staff meeting and took detailed notes of all the stuff that was going on. Raj wanted to figure out how he could help — from a networking perspective. Now my friend is not like Apu from The Simpsons or anything, but English is his second language.
He heard exec after exec talk about how they didn’t have enough “bandwidth” to finish some project or another, and if they just had more “bandwidth” they’d be so far ahead of the game. Raj decided this was his opportunity to spring into action. He dutifully began analyzing RTG charts and even started installing network response testing agents. He definitely found some bottlenecks with some congested segments. Raj began building a plan to move from a number of shared segments to switched fabric to the edge for some of these apparent power users that needed more “bandwidth.”
He took the proposal to his boss, who reviewed it and complimented him on a thorough job and well articulated argument. Raj’s boss then proceeded to calmly and very politely explain to him what the execs meant when they referred to “bandwidth.” His boss was just happy that Raj didn’t have signing authority for that much gear. Needless to say, Raj now calls me a fair bit to make sure he’s got English vernacular down.
It just struck me as funny because the story came up as we were launching our unmetered bandwidth by Cogent. We were going through the same discussions to figure out how much capacity we needed relative to demand from our customers. There has also been conversations about which of our multiple data centers we’d provision to accommodate growth. English is my second language, and let’s just say I chose my words carefully after talking with Raj.
- Urvish
