[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Jared Mauch]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 05:16:01PM +0000, Rick Martin wrote:
> 
> 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?

	If you purchase your own spares, you can often make due with a return to factory
model of parts replacement.  They will return you a new/refurbished part about
10 days after receipt of the failed one.

	Much of this depends on the commonality of the parts, any logistics 
you or a partner may have in providing that yourself.  Of course this depends
on the ability to triage yourself.  I've generally not had any issues with a
vendor when we say it failed, we swapped with spare, here's the serial.

	- Jared


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Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
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