On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 05:16:01PM +0000, Rick Martin wrote:
>
> I am under pressure to consider third party maintenance providers for our
> significant Cisco inventory, and I am quite leery of such an arrangement. I
> suppose third party maintenance may be OK for products that we have plenty of
> spare inventory for such as customer edge routers or switches but the bigger
> core, aggregation or data center devices that provide critical services I
> have great concern. Our normal policy is to keep OEM maintenance in the
> following order;
>
> 1. Critical Devices which includes core routing, aggregation devices, data
> center hardware and larger building routers - 24X7X4 hour RMA (Smartnet
> Premium)
> 2. Customer edge devices - 8X5XNBD (Smartnet)
>
> That methodology applies to Cisco and Juniper hardware.
>
> So my question is - do any of you that have larger enterprise or service
> provider networks currently utilize third party (Non OEM) maintenance
> contracts? If so what has been your experience with them? Or do you stick
> strictly to OEM maintenance?
If you purchase your own spares, you can often make due with a return
to factory
model of parts replacement. They will return you a new/refurbished part about
10 days after receipt of the failed one.
Much of this depends on the commonality of the parts, any logistics
you or a partner may have in providing that yourself. Of course this depends
on the ability to triage yourself. I've generally not had any issues with a
vendor when we say it failed, we swapped with spare, here's the serial.
- Jared
--
Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from [email protected]
clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
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