I guess it all depends on what you utilize support for. We tend to have in-house spares, etc. that we can swap in in the event of a failure. But, there are times when you need to talk to someone at TAC to get the bottom of an issue.
On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 12:36 PM, Jared Mauch <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > _______________________________________________ > cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] > https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp > archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/ > _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
