RE: cross connect reliability

["Michael K. Smith - Adhost" <mksmith () adhost com>]

Hello Michael:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael J McCafferty [mailto:mike () m5computersecurity com]
> Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 2:46 PM
> To: nanog
> Subject: cross connect reliability
>
> All,
>       Today I had yet another cross-connect fail at our colo provider.
> From
> memory, this is the 6th cross-connect to fail while in service, in
4yrs
> and recently there was a bad SFP on their end as well. This seemes
like
> a high failure rate to me. When I asked about the high failure rate,
> they said that they run a lot of cables and there is a lot of jiggling
> and wiggling... lots of chances to get bent out of whack from activity
> near my patches and cables.
>       Until a few years ago my time was spent mostly in single tenant
> data
> centers, and it may be true that we made fewer cabling changes and
made
> less of a ruckus when cabling... but this still seems like a pretty
> high
> failure rate at the colo.
>       I am curious; what do you expect the average reliability of your
> FastE
> or GigE copper cross-connects at a colo?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
I agree with their Reason for Outage, but it sounds like a design issue.
We prewire all of our switches to patch panels so they don't get touched
once they're installed.  The patch panels are much more friendly to
insertions and removals than a 48 port 1-U switch.  We also have
multiple connections on the fiber side to avoid those failures.  With
all of that, we still have failures, but their effect and frequency are
minimized.

Mike

--
Michael K. Smith - CISSP, GISP
Chief Technical Officer - Adhost Internet LLC mksmith () adhost com
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