cross connect reliability

Thu Sep 17 22:35:37 UTC 2009

Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> 
> On Sep 17, 2009, at 5:52 PM, 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.
>>
> 
> Or until someone pulls out the wrong cable (which has happened to me).
> 

That's not a failure though. It's a disconnection. It happens but is 
readily attributable to a cause.

Random failures of a single ports connectivity.... bizzare and annoying. 
Whole switches? Seen it.
Whole panels? Seen it.
Whole blades? Seen it.

Single port on a switch or patch panel? Never.