[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[Eli Kagan]

Not sure whether this is helping or not Rick, but I have used Dimension Data maintenance before. They would sell you a straight SmartNet contract or their own in-house maintenance, which might or might not be backed by Cisco. I bought the former for less common equipment like large switches as it was cheaper than their in-house contracts. I bought their in-house maintenance for anything smallish as it was half the price of Cisco's. As for most common parts like switches, I kept spares on site wherever possible and do without a maintenance. This might not work for you if you are under compliance regulations that require such contracts. As for their service, I had no complaints but no praises either. It works, but you need to keep in mind that you are dealing with a huge company.



Cheers,Eli

      From: Rick Martin <rick.martin at arkansas.gov>
 To: "cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net" <cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net> 
 Sent: Monday, January 23, 2017 12:16 PM
 Subject: [c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance
  

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

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