Rack rails on network equipment

Mon Sep 27 17:56:06 UTC 2021

That’s about the right failure rate for a population of 1000 switches. Enterprise switches typically have an MTBF of 700,000 hours or so, and 1000 switches operating 8760 hours (24x7) a year would be 8,760,000 hours. Divided by 12 failures (one a month), yields an MTBF of 730,000 hours. 

 -mel 

> On Sep 27, 2021, at 10:32 AM, Doug McIntyre <merlyn at geeks.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Sep 25, 2021 at 12:48:38PM -0700, Andrey Khomyakov wrote:
>> We operate over 1000 switches in our data centers, and hardware failures
>> that require a switch swap are common enough where the speed of swap starts
>> to matter to some extent. We probably swap a switch or two a month.
> ...
> 
> This level of failure surprises me. While I can't say I have 1000
> switches, I do have hundreds of switches, and I can think of a failure
> of only one or two in at least 15 years of operation. They tend to be
> pretty reliable, and have to be swapped out for EOL more than anything.
> 
> 
> 