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Hot take: that 'always buy new switches' advice cost my company $14k and I am done listening to it
My network admin buddy Marcus came by the office two weeks ago and watched me swap out a working 48 port gigabit switch just because it hit the five year mark on our refresh sheet. He asked me what was actually wrong with it and I did not have an answer. He runs the network for a school district over in Mesa and he told me they keep their access layer gear running for 9 or 10 years, they just replace the power supplies and keep spare fans on the shelf. We pulled our failure logs for the past three years and 11 of our 14 switch replacements happened on a calendar date, not because anything broke. That is about $14k in hardware we threw away for no real reason. Now I want to know if anyone here actually tracks failure rates before replacing, or if we all just do it because the vendor rep says so.
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faith_lopez481d ago
11 of our 14 switch replacements happened on a calendar date" hit me hard because I used to be the guy swapping gear just because the sheet said so. Then we tracked our own failures for a year and almost nothing died, the old stuff just kept chugging along. Wish more people would look at the actual numbers instead of the refresh schedule.
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