cross connect reliability

Thu Sep 17 22:21:13 UTC 2009

Alex Balashov wrote:
> Seth Mattinen wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> That's truly wishful thinking, as are the assumptions that insulate it
> from damaging factors.  Nothing lasts forever.
> 

What the OP is describing is abnormally high in my view.

Based purely on my own personal experience, the structured wiring in my
parent's house I put in in the mid 90's has never suffered a failure, is
still in use today, and it's in a residential environment with dogs and
cats. I'd expect a properly managed environment to fare at least as good
as that.

~Seth