With the exception of some government projects, cost is always a concern when building or upgrading a network, even when high availability is the desired end state. Is it practical to add $500,000 to the cost of creating and supporting services that yield a $50,000 annual revenue stream? Probably not. Would it be more tenable to protect a $50,000 revenue stream with $25,000 in high availability-focused enhancements? An investment like that makes sense.
Most books on the market today that describe “network solutions” do so with little consideration given to the price of equipment and support, and to additional operational expenses (OPEX) tied to space, power, and cooling. Why are these issues so commonly overlooked? Perhaps because prices are subject to change; they can be affected by discount models, and they change over time: some prices could be outdated before this book’s shelf life expires. Also, vendors occasionally discourage the release of price information in public forums.
This chapter does not attempt to capture the actual cost in real dollars of products from Juniper or any other vendor. Instead, we assign a baseline cost to a simple, nonredundant network, and then look at the relative changes that are associated with different forms of redundancy as described in the layered model. Likewise, we do not attempt to place specific makes and models of network products, such as routers, switches, and firewalls, in the design. Doing so could distract you from the true purpose of this chapter, which is to identify the relative cost of different layers of redundancy in a network.
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