Dean,
This is from my own experience as a former Bay Consultant & Bay Employee as
well as Net Mgt consultant.
For 14,000 devices, I'd be concerned about NT being able to handle them as
well as UNIX could. Maybe with many boxes, no problem, but not just two.
With all the traps, polling, misc SNMP traffic to them I'd be concerned. If
there is a cost issue here, you'd have to figure out how many NT boxes &
licenses you'd need and compare that to your two for UNIX - the costs I'd
think would be close, if not less for UNIX (depending on the number of
servers needed to handle 14k devices). It's been a while since I've done
much with Bay Networks (Nortel) stuff, but were these rebadged Bay routers
or truly Nortel boxes? I ask as if you are going to run Optivity or not in
addition to NV. If you are, again, it's a performance thing - UNIX
definitely will be able to handle it better as opposed to NT. You may also
want to check with your Nortel SE, or even check in the documentation for
Optivity, if I remember correctly, it will say what the recommendations are.
The only client I've worked with where they ended up going to NT was at a
govt job in Dallas where they wanted to run NT on a big laptop...don't ask -
it was a mess. They did however also have it running on a RS-6000 and it
was getting reinstalled after we finished with the network changes.
I guess given your situation, the only plus for NT would be an
administration one - you say you have plenty of people. However, how many
of these people know Network Management / Net View? I've run into problems
where you have 20 SAs and they all want to control NV. This is not a good
thing most of the time. If you do go the NT route, you may want/need to set
up guidelines as to who is in change and who can help. In a sense, to me,
the fact you have only two SAs for the UNIX box could be to your benefit.
Hope this helps,
Chris
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