Router Suggestions

Wed Jun 17 22:50:05 UTC 2020

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 5:28 PM Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jun 16, 2020, at 1:51 PM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 16/Jun/20 22:43, Owen DeLong wrote:
> >
> >> Covering them all under vendor contract doesn’t necessarily guarantee
> that
> >> the vendor does, either. In general, if you can cover 10% of your
> hardware
> >> failing in the same 3-day period, you’re probably not going to do much
> better
> >> with vendor support.
> >
> > In my experience, our vendors have been able to abide by their
> > obligations when we've had successive failures in a short period of
> > time, as long as our subscription is up-to-date.
> >
> > I am yet to be disappointed.
> >
>
> Count your blessings… I once faced a situation where a vendor had shipped
> a batch of defective power supplies (10s of thousands of them). It wasn’t
> just my network facing successive failures
> in this case, but widespread across their entire customer base… By day 2,
> all of their depots were depleted and day 3 involved mapping out “how
> non-redundant can we make the power in our
> routers to cover the outages that we’re seeing without causing more
> outages than we solve?”
>
> It was a genuine nightmare.

Huh, was this in the early to mid 1990’s?

I had an incident in NYC area where one of the large (at the time)
datacenter/IXPs had a power outage, and their transfer switch failed to
switch over. Customers were annoyed, so they promised another test, which
also failed, dropping power to the facility again... now customers were
hopping mad...

The next test was *just* of the generator, but with all of the work they
had done they had (somehow) gotten the transfer switch *really* confused /
hardwired into an odd state. This resulted in the facility being powered by
both the street power and the generator (at least for a few seconds until
the generator went “Nope!”)

 These were of course not synchronized, and so 120V equipment saw 0V, then
240V, then some weird harmonic, then other surprising values. .. most
supplies kind of dealt with this OK, but one of the really common models of
router, from the largest vendor upped and died. This resulted in a few
hundred dead routers and way exceeded the vendors spares strategies.

A number of customers (myself included) had 4 hour replacement contracts,
which the vendor really could not meet - so we agreed to take a new, much
larger/better model as a replacement.

W

>
> I’ve had other situations involving early failures of just released line
> cards and such as well.
>
> As I said, YMMV, but I’m betting your vendor doesn’t stock a second copy
> of every piece of covered equipment in the local depot. They’re playing the
> statistical probabilities just
> like anyone else stocking their own spares pool. The biggest difference is
> that they’re
> spreading the risk across a (potentially) much wider sample size which may
> better normalize
> the numbers.
>
> Owen
>
> --
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad idea in
the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair of
pants.
   ---maf
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