[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Shawn L]

I guess it all depends on what you utilize support for.  We tend to have
in-house spares, etc. that we can swap in in the event of a failure.  But,
there are times when you need to talk to someone at TAC to get the bottom
of an issue.



On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 12:36 PM, Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> --
> Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
> clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only
> mine.
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