cross connect reliability

Thu Sep 17 21:52:47 UTC 2009

Michael J McCafferty wrote:
> All,
> 	Today I had yet another cross-connect fail at our colo provider. From
> memory, this is the 6th cross-connect to fail while in service, in 4yrs
> and recently there was a bad SFP on their end as well. This seemes like
> a high failure rate to me. When I asked about the high failure rate,
> they said that they run a lot of cables and there is a lot of jiggling
> and wiggling... lots of chances to get bent out of whack from activity
> near my patches and cables.
> 	Until a few years ago my time was spent mostly in single tenant data
> centers, and it may be true that we made fewer cabling changes and made
> less of a ruckus when cabling... but this still seems like a pretty high
> failure rate at the colo.
> 	I am curious; what do you expect the average reliability of your FastE
> or GigE copper cross-connects at a colo?
> 

Never to fail? Seriously; if you're talking about a passive connection
(optical or electrical) like a patch panel, I'd expect it to keep going
forever unless someone damages it.

~Seth