cisco router life spans

[groovin]

we have lots of these that are almost 5 years old. none have died and from what i hear, they dont die very often. does anyone know what the supposed life span on these things are?

 

[spidey07]

a long time.



you can check cisco's site for MTBF numbers

 

[groovin]

thanks spidey,

i figured they would live a long time. no moving parts, good quality, etc.

has anyone ever felt necesary to purchase an extended replacement warranty on these things?

 

[spidey07]

I always purchase some kind of smartnet maintenance simply because gear does fail. you just don't know when.

I've probably seen about 100 cisco hardware failures...call 'em up and say "send me a replacement".

 

[groovin]

How much do you pay for an extended replacement warranty? how old were the routers that died?

 

[cmetz]

Environment matters. In a good environment, they usually either die infant death or last until they're long since obsolete. In harsh (hot, humid, static, dust etc.) environments, you will see premature failures.

If you have enough boxes in the field, eventually even a low failure rate will manifest itself as some units failing. Similarly, if you're critically dependent on it, something will go wrong just because. Like many vendors, Cisco makes A LOT of money on service contracts, because businesses don't want to buy mission-critical components without them. If you have even a few in the field, you may find that buying an extra cold spare is cost effective, however.

spidey07, it depends on what kind of customer you are and what equipment you're buying. If you're a tier-1 ISP buying 12000s by the pallet, you can call the SP-TAC and say "send this part here, NOW" and they usually are with the program. If you're a random enterprise customer buying random stuff, you will often discover that (a) the level one support monkey really wants to "help" you, isn't smart enough to understand the problem and isn't smart enough to listen to the customer, forcing you to go through the whole scripted routine to help the monkey learn what you already knew (Like I'm going to call up a vendor's support line *before* I diagnose the problem?), and (b) Cisco's parts inventory, especially for stuff that isn't highly mainstream, is often not good enough -- if they don't have the part on your coast, then you aren't getting it fixed today, regardless of what service committment you paid for. In some fairness, there's a long list of vendors whose names I could swap in for Cisco and these problems would be just as true of them. I've learned the hard way that if it's really critical, I get a cold spare (even if it's a limited capacity replacement) and don't bother with the vendor. In the time it takes just to navigate the vendor's "customer service," I can load a spare into my trunk and be on site swapping it in, and once I'm back at home base with the fire put out I can try to get the vendor to replace it.

 

[spidey07]

Good points cmetz.

I have actually had good fortune with replacement in the 48 states. Probably 95% of the time they meet the 4 hour response time.

But you are SO right about environment. The "trouble gear" is normally in a very dusty, hot/humid place.

I'll have to tell you about the time a pipe burst over one of our closets in california. We replaced the switches but some of water logged ones are in the lab, working fine.