New technology should simplify things, not complicate them

An old-school guy like me adheres to an old-school mantra on network and system administration: "If it 'ain't broke, don't fix it"

Rookie Netads and Sysads tend to be too excited when new technologies are available on the market. Under the impression that it will make their jobs and responsibilities easier, they jump to the bandwagon. First they sign up for a trial, then they extend the trial and eventually purchasing the product in the end. "Hey boss, this software/product will cut off costs and man-hours of working on _______ manually, blah, blah"

In other words, please buy this software for me. But sometimes we fail to put into consideration that introducing a new technology on our network most of the time tends to complicate things, especially in troubleshooting when problems start to surface.

There's this company based in the East Coast. They have a corporate size network, with a couple of WAN connections to connect to their regional offices and remote employees. Things were doing good until after they implemented redundancy across all routers and Layer 3 devices on their network. How ironic that they started experiencing major issues when they tried to implement a technology that address the availability of their network.

These guys implemented a technology that they fail to test first on at least half of the nodes/workstations on their network. They fell prey to the "herd mentality". Hey, customer ABC and XYZ are doing it, we should to, that type of herd mentality in IT. And hearing this directly coming from their "seasoned" IT Director saddens me.

Again, I am big fan of keeping things simple. A simple network consumes less resources in all aspects of your business or organization. From technical to administrative. If you want redundancy in your network, study the technology t first before implementing it. Try to look beyond brochures, case studies and white papers. Not all networks are the same despite what those "Best Practices" guide say.