[c-nsp] Tabo Topic? Third party Maintenance

[James Bensley]

On 23 January 2017 at 17:16, Rick Martin <rick.martin at arkansas.gov> 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?
>
> Thanks in advance for any input.

So I think you are talking mainly about hardware here. The usual "your
requirements are not my requirements" rules apply but in general we
have a mix and that works well for us.

>From the software side we have TAC support from all our various
vendors so we can call them up 24x7x365 to look at an issue we can't
fix (maybe it’s a bug, change in behaviour between firmware versions,
undocumented feature etc). That is crucial.

But for the hardware side we have "on site" spares (for us this means
spares stores spread out across the UK) and we use a 3rd party company
(we actually own them but that doesn't mean a delivery van is less
likely to crash en route).

It’s fucking expensive to have fully loaded ASR9000 chassis just
sitting around in a cupboard ready to go. It’s cheap to have little
access layer switches, CPEs, SFPs, blades, UPS's whatever in your
cupboard. So we keep spares of the lower end kit within arm's reach
(i.e. we can have it on site from our nearest stores location within
the SLA we promised to our customers). If we need an MX960 chassis
fully loaded we call our hardware supplier. We have a contract with
them for X kit anywhere in the UK with in Y hours. Z kit which is less
important is guaranteed onsite in Y*2 hours, and so on.

So it works for us and it could work for you. You need to weigh up the
variables of what have you promised to your customers, what can the
OEM supplier offer to you, what are the possible failure scenarios
that would stop them making their SLA? If your one and only core
router goes bang, and their store is 2 hours away, and they get 1h59
minutes from you with the replacement and crash the van into a lake
and the replacement is wrecked, can you wait another 2h's?

Cheers,
James.