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Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

arstechnica.com

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Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#141

Post by nickzoic »

hmottestad wrote: post #40
iamjason89 wrote: post #3

"The auditor began digging, speaking to many people in West Virginia state government who had been involved with the project. The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use…

It would kinda be like buying a really expensive 24 port router and then just using 2 ports.....oh wait....that's what they did already. Dual power supplies is a bit overkill. Although I remember my high school admin got a central router with dual power supply, but when you plugged both in at once (from the same source) they drew too much power on a reboot and flipped the fuse after every blackout.

shrug If you want it to actually work, all the time, go with dual hotpluggable PSUs on everything every time. And two separate UPSs.

If the cheapest router Cisco has with dual PSUs is a 39xx, well, I guess that's what you need.

Of course, there's an argument there that "99.999% uptime" is pretty pointless for a town library in the middle of nowhere, but that's a whole 'nother argument.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#142

Post by InclinedPlane »

jeltz wrote: post #133
InclinedPlane wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government takes money from people involuntarily, corporations receive money due to voluntary transactions. If I never buy a product from Apple or Exxon, there's no problem with that. If I don't pay taxes I go to jail.

Your comparison is incorrect. The citizens of a company are its shareholders, not its customers. And if you are a shareholder the company is indeed spending YOUR money.

Becoming a shareholder is voluntary.

And if you discover that a company is not doing enough to prevent fraud then you can divest yourself of that company. This in itself is another form of negative feedback which exists much more strongly for corporations than for government. Because individuals divesting themselves of a public stock company will result in the stock price dropping which will have a negative impact on the company, encouraging it to do something about the problem.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#143

Post by nickzoic »

caw wrote: post #9
iamjason89 wrote: post #3

"The auditor began digging, speaking to many people in West Virginia state government who had been involved with the project. The Department of Education told him that it "did not request or require that the routers for the state's schools have internal dual power supplies. Education would not have made this requirement because unless a school has two power sources the feature of dual power supplies would have no use…

For full redundancy, yes. You get redundant power supplies by plugging both into the same power feed. However, you can gain some extra redundancy by plugging each power supply into a different circuit, and reducing the common point of failure (shared power source).

Two UPSes.

Although I've got a good war story on that one too, I had a machine with redundant PSUs emit a stream of smoke from one of the PSUs. It was happily up and serving while smoking out the machine room until the operator (rather sensibly) grabbed both power leads and pulled, at which point both fire and ssh went out ...

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#144

Post by jcromartie »

vidarh wrote: post #28
redshirtrob wrote: post #11

I'd like to know how much of that $5 million savings would have been burned up in the capacity studies. My guess is a lot. Given the choice between a fixed cost and an unbounded cost (being the capacity study referenced throughout the article) I'm not surprised they went with the fixed cost. I'm not saying WV didn't get swindled, but I can sure see how this might have happened: WV Rep: Do we really need these $20k ro…

Here's a capacity study for you: E-mail all the IT managers, and ask them: - How many users do you have? - What is the total size of the community you serve? - Do you need new equipment? That would have quickly revealed that many of them had so few users that these routers were total overkill, and had so few potential users that even 100% simultaneous usage in some cases would not max out the capacity, and that some…

I doubt the one-room library open three days a week has an IT manager. But yes, obviously they know where the equipment needs to be so somebody must be able to make an educated guess.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#145

Post by SpikeGronim »

I saw the exact same thing with Cisco in the NY public school system. They gave my high school something like $50,000 of equipment in a rack to support two machines that submitted grades. We stripped it for parts and put it to better use, it had some really nice switches in it. But it was clearly misspent public money. At least we did put it to use in classrooms, though not as they intended.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#146

Post by Tloewald »

nikcub wrote: post #8

I have first hand experience with this, although in Australia. My first job was working for a IT development and solutions shop (this is over 17 years ago) where they won the bid to rollout the internet and network gateways across a large number of Australian government schools. We were doing similar work for private school at the same time, and the process for the public and private school could not be more differen…

This all stems from the outsourcing mania of the 80s which was driven by the idea you could save money by firing your internal IT people and outsourcing everything. It's been a boondoggle throughout the western world.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#147

Post by mamcx »

_delirium wrote: post #35
vidarh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get similar stuff at private companies too, though few private companies are large enough for corruption like that to be able to reach the same scale without getting too big to go unnoticed by auditors for long enough. The number of times I've had potential supplier hint at extra perks or "return favours" is fairly high, and I've not even been in positions of very substantial purchasing power. It's often not even…

This was my 2nd-hand impression growing up with a father who worked for a large oil company. The extent to which nobody was really at the wheel in these kinds of negotiations was fascinating. As far as I could tell, many things sort of worked, when they did, because engineers had a cultural desire to "get it right", mostly for their own satisfaction. But the company itself didn't seem to either have an effective way…

I "lost" a contract (to use http://www.elmalabarista.com/bestseller) with a big company in my country. To make it short, they choose the company of a "friend of a friend", that use a outdated tech (windows mobile) with absurd-costly mobile devices (and they object our use of iOS! their devices cost 4x), that NOT work at all, that was collecting dust (literally) in a sub-company.

I tell the guy that manage the sale: "Hey, fine if don't choose us, but if you choose them you will lose ALL the money, for sure". The answer? "We don't care about lose money".

PLOP!

We walk away, relieved of "lost" that client.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#148

Post by homosaur »

scotty79 wrote: post #76
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cisco may not have anything to do with it. It may be down to a salesman in the middle who is on commission. I once saw CCTV cameras deployed with Jena lenses, I guess for similar reasons. The auditors (if there were any) weren't knowledgeable enough to know better. edit: After further reading, Cisco did in fact shamelessly participate in this gigantic boondoggle.

In my country government officials are usually paid to be this stupid. I can't imagine USA government officials are this stupid for free. I know ... never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity, but come on! Someone sure got at least a nice car out of it.

Well there is something to be said for know-little middle management types seeing a name brand on something and then throwing the whole budget at it because they don't know what the hell they are doing. That's not even a shot at Cisco's products, just that tons of people buy Cisco hardware solely on the brand name than actually investigate what their needs are. Microsoft is the same way.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#149

Post by njx »

This could have been executed by the process "Wired RFP". just look for the this term and you will see references where government RFPs are wired to specific vendor. In other sense, no other vendor may qualify to bid based on the RFP requirement.

For e.g RFP bidding/winning criteria is based on point system.

1. Price accounts for 25% 2. Referrals from similar orgs 40% and so on

you see, when the price in the RFP accounts less then it is an indication that the RFP is wired to a specific vendor.

A small business who is just starting may or may not have 3 or more referrals from a public school or university.

In one of the RFP process I sat, the RFP had a typo where they had literally spelled out the name of a competitor company. I pointed out this in the pre-bidding call and the personnel acknowledged that it was a mistake.

Government RFP are a waste of time because it is the last step the government does in their purchasing process. They have already chosen the vendor and most of the time the vendor helps them write the RFP.

Fixing the RFP process may eliminate some of the overspending.

Re: Why a one-room West Virginia library runs a $20,000 Cisco router

#150

Post by dalke »

jeffdavis wrote: post #99

I was surprised how much blame this article lays at the feet of Cisco. What did they do except sell the customer what they wanted? Sure, they might have been more noble if they put on the breaks in the name of the taxpayers, but that could hardly be expected. It takes a lot of nerve for someone who just wasted my money (federal dollars) to try to blame it on the other party for fulfilling the order.

Did we read different articles? The one I read says "The report finds plenty of blame to go around. The ultimate cause of the fiasco, it says, was the fact the grant implementers did not conduct a capacity or use study before spending $24 million." This does not place the ultimate blame on Cisco.

You say "what [West Virginia] wanted", but the article shows how Cisco was unable to show that they knew what WV wanted. For example, Cisco claims that WV specified internal dual power supplies but there is no record that WV ever had that requirement. Instead, "what WV wanted" is defined only as being whatever WV signed off on at the end.

As to if Cisco's behavior is expected or not, the Ars article says: "[Cisco] had a moral responsibility to propose a plan which reasonably complied with Cisco's own engineering standards" but that instead "Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers."

Ars even links to section 5A-3-33d of the West Virginia Code. The likely relevant clause is "(B) Performance in violation of standards established by law or generally accepted standards of the trade or profession amounting to intentionally deficient or grossly negligent performance on one or more public contracts;", and the auditor's report shows examples of how Cisco's actions were likely in violation of their own published standards.

This is not a crime. As the article says, the strongest remedy regarding Cisco is that Cisco might be "barred from bidding on future projects."

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