[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Rick Martin]

I am under pressure to consider third party maintenance providers for our significant Cisco inventory, and I am quite leery of such an arrangement.  I suppose third party maintenance may be OK for products that we have plenty of spare inventory for such as customer edge routers or switches but the bigger core, aggregation or data center devices that provide critical services I have great concern. Our normal policy is to keep OEM maintenance in the following order;

1. Critical Devices which includes core routing, aggregation devices, data center hardware and larger building routers - 24X7X4 hour RMA (Smartnet Premium)
2. Customer edge devices - 8X5XNBD (Smartnet)

That methodology applies to Cisco and Juniper hardware. 

So my question is - do any of you that have larger enterprise or service provider networks currently utilize third party (Non OEM) maintenance contracts? If so what has been your experience with them? Or do you stick strictly to OEM maintenance?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Rick Martin
Network Architect
State of Arkansas, Department of Information Systems
(501) 682-4037