Network downtime: the finger of blame points at end users

The annual Black Box survey examines a variety of issues within the networking industry. One regular feature is a look at the reliability of corporate networks - not in vendors' labs (or dreams) but in actual offices across the country. As such, it is one of the few realistic snapshots of how kit is performing on a day-to-day basis.

One significant finding was that there were fewer network failures this year than last. Despite this, one in 10 networks still fall over every month - and the average downtime resulting form these failures has actually increased.

Silicon.com went to the Networks Telecom show in Birmingham and asked some exhibitors and visitors what they thought about the results of the survey, and whether the networking industry is guilty of complacency. You can watch the whole video in the Fast Networking Channel (http://www.silicon.com/networking).

Kevin Kivlochan, a director at ONI, made the point that telecoms networks function at an expected reliability of 'five nines' (or 99.999 per cent) reliability - which works out at five minutes downtime per year. The data networking industry, however, works on expected uptime of 98 per cent. Over a year this works out as 157 hours without a functioning network."

He said: "Unfortunately, this has become an acceptable rate of failure." Kivlochan blames the hardware manufacturers for misleading customers by focusing on the "cost of the tin and the price per port" rather than factoring in other costs, including reliability, into the equation.

Peter Olive, managing director of GeoTrain, agrees that manufacturers are guilty of complacency, but also fears the impact of the skills shortage. He said: "There is complacency in the industry. We all know there is a massive skills shortage coming. The latest research shows there will be 80,000 more jobs then than engineers within two years. A lot of networks are supported by people not qualified to look after them. That's why you get such high rates of crashes."

Dieter Van Acken, director of corporate marketing at Tobit, blamed the size of applications networks are having to support these days. But Matt Rushton, marketing manager at Elcon Technology, claimed users constantly push the barriers, and blamed the industry for not keeping people abreast of new developments.

Pim Bilderbeek, director of network research Europe for IDC, puts the blame firmly with end users. He said "I think the industry is addressing this issue. It is up to customers. They should look at the total cost of the network, not just the cost of hardware. They should look at how much their network is worth to their business - even for a small or medium business losing access to email and applications every month has an impact on their business."

So, it seems users and vendors are equally culpable: the vendors are guilty of focusing on innovation at the expense of reliability, while users overload the infrastructure with huge applications, and fail to address the total costs of network downtime.