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Shoretel Phone Project - Network Switching Debacle
it_consultant
Member Posts: 1,903
in Off-Topic
One of my clients is upgrading their old digital/analog NEC to a SIP Shoretel. They use a telecom consulting company who are known for putting incredibly cheap (in price AND quality) phone systems into organizations and marrying the support of those devices to whatever phone vendor they cherry picked. This annoys me because their less than 10 year old NEC should be good to go for another couple of years but it isn't, because they went cheap in 2003. The voicemail server runs on OS/2...I wish I were joking. Now I am seeing them do the same thing again with this project even though they were provided bids by Avaya, Cisco, other Shoretel vendors, and a few others. This one won the bid because it was the lowest cost - even among the Shoretel bids.
Once this was decided on we started digging through the specifics and I found something shocking. These were the network switches that they were going to use:
NETGEAR ProSafe GSM7352Sv2 - switch - 48 ports - managed - desktop - GSM7352SV2 - Fixed (Managed) Switches - CDW.com
With the stacking modules it was about $5K for one switch. I have nothing against Netgear, but I haven't heard really any other network or telco engineer that thought using a Netgear to pin down a medium sized business with heavy voice and data use was a good idea. After, I kid you not, two months of arguing about this. The client went with our recommendation (and bought through another vendor so we wouldn't make a markup) for 2 of each:
HP E5412-96G zl Switch - J8700A#ABA - Modular Switches - CDW.com
HP 3800-24G-2SFP+ Switch - switch - 24 ports - managed - rack-mountable - J9575A#ABA - Fixed (Managed) Switches - CDW.com
Keep in mind we use Ingram Micro or SHI, so the real price to the client for the chassis was something like half of what CDW lists. We also bought some expansion modules for the 5412s that were needed for this environment.
Now I realize that since this particular company won the bid based on a price achieved by quoting substandard switches, the whole project should be rebid, or at least the existing bids should be re-examined. The telco consultants were highly annoyed that we questioned the bid, even though they eventually realized that we were right. It degenerated to a point where I had to say in one of our many con calls that they could have recommended almost any well known brand; Cisco, HP, Extreme, Brocade, some Dell lines, Avaya, Ad Tran, and we would have been fine. There are two brands we would question, DLINK and NETGEAR.
Rant over. The nice thing about consulting is that I get to work on enterprise class switches of all brands, the bad part is I have to deal with some nasty politics.
Once this was decided on we started digging through the specifics and I found something shocking. These were the network switches that they were going to use:
NETGEAR ProSafe GSM7352Sv2 - switch - 48 ports - managed - desktop - GSM7352SV2 - Fixed (Managed) Switches - CDW.com
With the stacking modules it was about $5K for one switch. I have nothing against Netgear, but I haven't heard really any other network or telco engineer that thought using a Netgear to pin down a medium sized business with heavy voice and data use was a good idea. After, I kid you not, two months of arguing about this. The client went with our recommendation (and bought through another vendor so we wouldn't make a markup) for 2 of each:
HP E5412-96G zl Switch - J8700A#ABA - Modular Switches - CDW.com
HP 3800-24G-2SFP+ Switch - switch - 24 ports - managed - rack-mountable - J9575A#ABA - Fixed (Managed) Switches - CDW.com
Keep in mind we use Ingram Micro or SHI, so the real price to the client for the chassis was something like half of what CDW lists. We also bought some expansion modules for the 5412s that were needed for this environment.
Now I realize that since this particular company won the bid based on a price achieved by quoting substandard switches, the whole project should be rebid, or at least the existing bids should be re-examined. The telco consultants were highly annoyed that we questioned the bid, even though they eventually realized that we were right. It degenerated to a point where I had to say in one of our many con calls that they could have recommended almost any well known brand; Cisco, HP, Extreme, Brocade, some Dell lines, Avaya, Ad Tran, and we would have been fine. There are two brands we would question, DLINK and NETGEAR.
Rant over. The nice thing about consulting is that I get to work on enterprise class switches of all brands, the bad part is I have to deal with some nasty politics.