On 10/07/2013 06:55 PM, David Brodbeck wrote:
I would ask, however, why a cheap-ass educational establishment has so many expensive UPSes, but can't pay for their monitoring software. ;)
Spoken like someone who doesn't know how university budgets work. ;)
Generally university budgets are done on a year-to-year (or biennium-to-biennium) basis. There's no guarantee money you have now will be there next year, and in fact anything you don't spend in a given budget year disappears. The result is it's often easy to get money for one-time purchases, but arranging regular payment for things like software subscriptions is nearly impossible.
This is how budgeting works in just about any organisation. That doesn't take away from the fact 100 GBP is... 100 GBP :) Make sure to budget enough Cisco rack ears ;-)
Tom