Where I work, we're a pretty heavy cisco shop.... We've got 2 CCNA's (who are both going for ccnp) and our manager is CCNP Voice. We've worked on cisco gear for years, we have experience with it and understand how it works. Cisco has the market, thats a reason, for example, why HP CLI is extremely similar. So guys like me can QUICKLY go and configure vlans or something on a switch. Saving a couple hundred on a switch if your guys have to re-learn them isn't worth while.

Would an OPENBSD rig running OOSPFD or OBGPD be cheeper? YES. Would it likely be as fast? PROBABLY (if not faster). Would anybody know how to use it? PROBABLY NOT. While it could be learned.....time has a value. The exception is if you're starting from the ground up and have IT staff and procedures of size that could actually support 'non standard' gear. AKA if you get hit by a bus and you're the only guy in your shop -- how easy would it to be to get someone up to speed on your current gear? or do you need to fly in a specialist.

TL;DR: We use the gear because we can find people who know it easily without having to fly in a specialist.

Sorry, I use my dodge ram (with Duallies, thats what we call them) to go grocery shopping, to pull my boat, to pull a horse trailer, to help friends move. But saying that I'm unsafe because I drive a pickup is pretty narrow minded. I'd imagine that I'm less dangerous than 20somethings with sportbikes or a sports cars. Oh or the soccer-moms texting&driving with a minivan full of kids. Jackass.

Wait, you're using free vmware and your client's vm's have more than 32 gigs of ram? I'm hoping that's against your best recommendations to the client (and maybe they're cheap bastards). Otherwise that's retarded.

...I thought of battlefield 3 and ripping through there in a littlebird heli? :D :\

I really REALLY want to see the size of their routing/switching equipment, let alone racks of gear for processing/encoding/streaming. Hitting 700gigs/sec is PRETTY killer.

As the only IT guy here (120 users, 9 servers), they make me wear dress pants/shoes/shirt at all times.

It's a bit frustrating, but they are very stuck in the 70's that way...but they give IT a decent budget so I cant complain too much :)

As the IT admin with no CS degree that has a healthy job with decent pay...Allow me to elaborate on a couple small things:
1. CS is not IT. So many newbies come out with a CS degree and think they're shit-hot at running a network. Then they dont even know how to swap the tapes out.
2. Social Networking is EVERYTHING. It's not alllll what you know, but who you know -- you may be great with GPO's and cisco gear and write a mean shell script, but if you dont have the industry connections, you're not likely to get that special job that someone knows YOU are perfect for.
3. Idiotic HR departments & Municipalities look for a degree over real experience. I've been told before that I got 2nd place in an interview to someone who had 1/10th the experience but had the degree. Subsequently he was fired a couple of months later, but ALAS the door was still closed because I didnt have my papers. Then I became an IT director for an insurance company with a healthy six figure budget. Their loss is my gain, I guess.

TL;DR: MAKE FRIENDS & KNOW YOUR SHIT. I dont demand you're a cisco god, or anything like that, but smart and willing to learn doesnt hurt. Everyone gets experience on the job, but the really good guys are eager to learn EVERYTHING, inside & out.

I'll just leave this here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_(film)/
It was made 3 years before I was born. But I did catch original transformers & spiderman & gi-joe. (and a-team re-runs) Ahhhh the 80's, could do no wrong..

A pretty good post. I'll back you up from a larger perspective. I've got a X3620 M3 (7376E3U) (fully loaded) sitting on my bench as a spare, go ibm go. I've got about double the workstations, and about 50tb of data on store. (Large Raid 6 arrays). ALL DIRECT ATTACH! Where's your god now?

In a given night we will back up about 10tb of data to our backup systems in another building across site.

Although, to be honest, I'd happily run iScsi if 10Gig cards&switches werent so damned expensive. I'll wait another year or two. Our main systems run Centos, but exchange/AD/terminal services are all members of the 2008 R2 flavour. All on esxi 4.1. I would likely curl up in a ball and die without vmware/veeam backup&replication. We previously ran hyper-v server as our hypervisor for our systems and they ran like dogs. Switched to ESXI 4.1 and it was like getting a free upgrade. I suspect that in another year or two when XEN/KVM are a little more matured/tested etc, you'll start to see larger scale admins (like myself) pushing new machines off to xen/kvm and slowly letting the old machines die off.

I've got an evga Z68 board. I'm quite happy with the 16 gigs of ram I use for it. But I guess that's because my VM's and Databases run on my SERVER, not my performance gaming machine.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance

amazon has gpu instances :)

AWS EC2 was my response aswell. :)

for raw horsepower on the short - medium term, use AWS http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

ec2 should do well for this, imho :)

If I had points to give. I'd mod you up so hard.

I'm the sysadmin at a medium sized company, and we just ordered a bunch of USED 7206VXR's with NPE400's. Why? Because they're $1300 each and they haul ass & handle MPLS and VOICE. I'm happy with that for the price. :)

Wow, he just TROLLED THE CRAP out of slashdot. We mad, bros!