Re: Router Suggestions

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> On Jun 16, 2020, at 1:51 PM, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () 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.

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