Why Buying Future Proof Technology Is A Sure Way of Losing Money

With technological advancement accelerating, the changes over the next ten years are likely to be even more dramatic than those over the last. Predicting developments in technology is a bit like forecasting the weather: if you know what you're doing, you can make reasonable guesses as to what's around the corner, but try doing it any distance into the future and you're setting yourself up for a fall.

When you're specifying network systems, a fall means expense, and usually a lot of it.

Specifying one or two extra slots for extra cards in the next few months or year is usually prudent, but it's almost always wasteful going any further. While there is always the chance that additional slots over and above those one or two may be needed, designing for that small possibility is rarely wise: it ties up money that could be much more effectively deployed elsewhere on the network today.

Specify what you need today, with a little expansion room for the immediate future. If you do find at some point in the future that you need extra network resources over and above those for which you've allowed space, then re-specifying the appropriate parts of the network to cater for those resources can usually be done economically, especially as the general trend of hardware prices is always downwards rather than upwards.