Re: cross connect reliability

[Charles Wyble <charles () thewybles com>]

Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> On Sep 17, 2009, at 5:52 PM, Seth Mattinen wrote:
>
> > Michael J McCafferty wrote:
> > > 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?
> >
> > Never to fail? Seriously; if you're talking about a passive connection
> > (optical or electrical) like a patch panel, I'd expect it to keep going
> > forever unless someone damages it.
>
> Or until someone pulls out the wrong cable (which has happened to me).

That's not a failure though. It's a disconnection. It happens but is 
readily attributable to a cause.

Random failures of a single ports connectivity.... bizzare and annoying. 
Whole switches? Seen it.
Whole panels? Seen it.
Whole blades? Seen it.

Single port on a switch or patch panel? Never.