A court in Düsseldorf remains cool and calm

Mr. K. is a system administrator in a big court in Düsseldorf. He gave us a call on a friday afternoon, 1:00 pm, explaining he has a problem in his local area network.

"Hello Mr. Brieger,

today two of four of my „XY” switches felt out of order. For god´s sake we have SUSI in business, none of the users (1.200) recognized anything. May you please visit us during the next week to find out what happend to the switches? Let´s talk beginning of the next week about the details.

Have a nice weekend..."

50% backbone loss and nobody recognized it

Mr. W. is a system admin of a district government. After his well-awarded one week of vacation he started his management again. Terrified he recognized that 5 out of 10 of his backbone switches where "RED", means that these are out of work for four days now. Immediatly he asked his collegue if he has had some trouble with the user regarding the failures. He asked him back: "Which failures, why "red" switches?" He hasn´t heard anything about this.

Even the public authority calculates the “Return of Investment“

The judical affairs invested beginning 1997 in a "fibre-to-the-desk" infrastructure, firstly with SUSI components. It was reported to us in February 1998 that half of the investement has been amortizised during the first year in use due to less administrative work and will be completly paid off by end of the second year.

Data processing service centre in Duisburg and Cologne compared theis cost of operation

In the year 1993 a data processing service centre in Duisburg decided to install a "fibre-to-the-desk" local area network, the sister company in Cologne to install a category 5 network one year later. Currently, after a non-failure operation of 5 year in Duisburg and 4 years in Cologne, the management board draw a significant balance.

The ongoing operation costs at the centre in Duisburg for administration and maintenance of the fibre optic network are approximatly DM 50.000/year. These costs are only for little maintenance with a long personal effort, which can be done "on-the-job". The centre in Cologne had to invest DM 350.000/year for the same issues, 2 employees had to be engaged especially for the maintanance of the copper net including the necessary material and spare parts. The energie consuption and safety installations raised 70% more costs than the counterpart fibre optic net in Dusiburg.

IP phones are not yet fully developed, or?

It was summer, hot and sultry, nevertheless the CIO of a hospital near Frankfurt came to Mühltal to take part in a presentation regarding our "NATJA ISDN-over-IP" solution.

After the lunch break we wanted to go on, Mr. A. asked to make a call to his office. Our CIO, Ralf Hintner advised him a phone on the desk of our meeting room and went out to pick a cup coffee. After the presentation was nearly over he said:

Mr. A.: “Fine, that was the theorie. But all manufacturers are telling me how fabulous their IP phones are. But now I want to hear, how this really is with the delay, the cracks, the menu and especially the operation."

Mr. Hintner: “Why this? You have already tried this before!"

Mr. A.: “What, this was an IP phone?! I have used this like usual."

Mr. Hintner: “Yes!“

A courtyard, somewhere in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Their way of thinking was:

SUSI 110 is much slower that a "full switched" solution.
What ever "full switched" may be, SUSI 110 has always been a "fully" effective switch. But now the observation itself; the chief administrator reports:

A courtyard in Nordrhein-Westfalen has not been equipped with SUSI 110 for several reasons.
The owner had once decided to install a 1:1 solution using media converters, which seemed to be the variant with the lower investment. The price of the hardware was about 35% less than the SUSI 110. The chief administrator is familiar with the media converters as well as with the SUSI 110 technic par excellence.

He actually reported to us, that the 10 mbp/s ethernet ports seem to be much faster to the users regarding the total speed of the network than the 100 mbp/s ports at the so called "full switched" media converter infrastructure.

And, to be honest, the part of the local network equipped with the media converters are more instable and unreliable than the SUSI-part; and loss and out-of-work time is about 8-10 times higher.

"We better had r e a l l y focused on the money as on the price!"

It might be that way.