Do It Yourself?
First calculate your cost of assembling the bits you want...
Your checklist should you attempt to do this out of various bits and boxes. You may decide you don't want them all. Watch those support charges - there will be 3 items... updates, helpdesk support (hours per year), and the right to upgrade. Oh yes, IT providers expect you to replace your investment every 3-4 years!
Now estimate how you build it...
How much time will it take to assemble this. How much space will it take? Who does it? If that person leaves or moves on, what will you do then?
Now estimate Time and Cost for basic operations?
How quick to add a customer, join two offices, provide a forwarded public IP, change a service level, add a workstation? Medusa takes 20 seconds for any of these and you can do it for free, yourself.
The North American Calculation
Our partners for North America at ETS did their own calculation of this... Enjoy! ETS Online
Medusa Major Component
|
Typical Industry Alternative |
Average Cost + support cost as % of system buy price |
Set up & Support Issues |
1. Firewall
|
Cisco Pix or Juniper Sonicwall |
£3K + 20%/year
|
Expert use only - 5/10 hours to set up? |
2. Traffic Manager
|
Packeteer / Allot etc
|
£4K-£7K (price is bandwidth dependent) + 20%/year |
Very expert set up & manage |
3. Load Balancer
|
Cisco, unbranded or ISP based
|
Unbranded boxes £2K |
Which traffic can be balanced and which can't? Constant management required.
|
4. Switches
|
Layer 3 branded switches |
+50% to +200% of Medusa recomended solution |
Other components expect Cisco etc. See also 5. |
5. Switch Manager Software (who gets service on which port)
|
Cisco or HP or 3rd party solution
|
£2K + 15% support/updates |
needs PC to run on, not based on customer names so hard to know what's happening |
| 6. Billing and reporting |
Usually a separate package - nothing off the shelf for multi-tennanted buildings |
build it yourself |
maintenance; change of personnel |
| 7. System Database |
Nothing off the shelf available
|
Build it yourself |
maintenance; change of personnel |
|
8. Hotdesks, wireless, virtuals
|
Either Cafe/hotel appliances or Cisco wireless sub-system |
Whatever you want to spend.... |
Security, speed of set up |
|
9. Diagnostics
|
SNMP based management systems |
Some are free - some cost £15K.
|
Really, really complex ....
|
|
10. Converged voice and data
|
You should have designed that in at stages 1,2,3,4,5& 7
|
Probably your voice provider refuses to let you do this ...
|
If it goes wrong, you'll know all about it!
|
There's more than this, by the way...
(£=1.5US$; £=1.1€)
|