Followup British Telecom outage reason

Deepak Jain deepak at ai.net
Mon Nov 26 17:11:02 UTC 2001


[I may digress a bit.. apologies]

I think there is a second order effect on revenue though. The more
reliable/stable the gear is, the less expensive the support contract you may
be inclined to get for it.

Would you really get 4hr replacement if you can't think of the last time a
particular series of box failed? If you really need 4 hr replacement [this
gets mentioned very often] its cheaper to keep spares of your own, so then
wouldn't next business day suffice?

Although we keep spares for our low end switch blades and switches, they
really aren't worth keeping on Smartnet because 1) the OS virtually never
changes, and 2) they don't fail outside of warranty. Or at least, not in my
experience.

I think recognizing this, Cisco for example has given smaller switches
lifetime warranties with lifetime OS upgrades.

If routers worked [/could work] this way, no one with a good technical team
in house would buy support contracts.

[Think of the pharmaceutical industry] Its much more profitable to "treat"
an illness than cure it. If as an entity, expensive gear is expensive to
maintain, there is more money to be made.
Mainframes were the same way until PCs and workstations continuously ate at
their market share and the costs of problem solving.

Today even though mainframes have gotten oodles cheaper to buy and run, if
you really want a mainframe, you have to have a great reason.

Deepak Jain
AiNET

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
Daniel Golding
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 11:51 AM
To: Christian Kuhtz; S; nanog at merit.edu
Subject: RE: Followup British Telecom outage reason



This used to be the cc train, then later the S train. However, the S train
has never been as stable as cc, and it has become increasingly less stable
over time, with too many new features rolling in.

I'd be curious as to exactly which CEF bugs bit them. The introduction of
greater MPLS functionality seems to have given CEF a nasty bit of
destabilization.

- Daniel Golding

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Christian Kuhtz
> Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2001 12:57 AM
> To: S; nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: RE: Followup British Telecom outage reason
>
>
>
>
> > you are right.  But in an era of focusing on the box, vendors are
> > forgetting that solid software and knowledgable support are just as
> > important.
> >
> > Possibly slow down a bit on rolling all those new features and widgets
> > into the software.... Make the software do what it should,
> reliably.. then
> > put the new stuff in there.
> >
> > ie.. bug scrub a train, per chassis.  Make it solid.. then put the toyz
> > in.
>
> easier said than done when everybody wants every fancy new feature 110%
> solid and yesterday.
>
>





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