On 23 January 2017 at 17:16, Rick Martin <[email protected]> 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? > > Thanks in advance for any input.
So I think you are talking mainly about hardware here. The usual "your requirements are not my requirements" rules apply but in general we have a mix and that works well for us. From the software side we have TAC support from all our various vendors so we can call them up 24x7x365 to look at an issue we can't fix (maybe it’s a bug, change in behaviour between firmware versions, undocumented feature etc). That is crucial. But for the hardware side we have "on site" spares (for us this means spares stores spread out across the UK) and we use a 3rd party company (we actually own them but that doesn't mean a delivery van is less likely to crash en route). It’s fucking expensive to have fully loaded ASR9000 chassis just sitting around in a cupboard ready to go. It’s cheap to have little access layer switches, CPEs, SFPs, blades, UPS's whatever in your cupboard. So we keep spares of the lower end kit within arm's reach (i.e. we can have it on site from our nearest stores location within the SLA we promised to our customers). If we need an MX960 chassis fully loaded we call our hardware supplier. We have a contract with them for X kit anywhere in the UK with in Y hours. Z kit which is less important is guaranteed onsite in Y*2 hours, and so on. So it works for us and it could work for you. You need to weigh up the variables of what have you promised to your customers, what can the OEM supplier offer to you, what are the possible failure scenarios that would stop them making their SLA? If your one and only core router goes bang, and their store is 2 hours away, and they get 1h59 minutes from you with the replacement and crash the van into a lake and the replacement is wrecked, can you wait another 2h's? Cheers, James. _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
