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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Followup British Telecom outage reason
On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 10:20:55AM -0600, Brett Frankenberger wrote:
> > I'm referring to the _vendor's_ support costs - as in, you don't need as
> > many people in the TAC if people don't keep running into IOS bugs; you
> > don't need as large of a RMA pool if the hardware is more reliable, etc.
>
> What percentage of TAC personnel's time is spent dealing with calls
> that ultimately result in a BugID? NANOG isn't representative; mostly,
> TAC exists to take calls from idiots who bought a box that they don't
> know how to configure. Large network operators have a staff of people
> to handle that, so when they call TAC, the box is probably broken. I
> don't think that's the case with the majority of TAC cases, though.
For most Vendors, depends which TAC and at what level. Having certain
letters after your name (Exact combination depends on the Vendor of course)
means you get cases picked up in record time by top TAC engineers and if
you get Service Provider contracts you can get your "own" TAC
engineers/teams to ring when things break. I would imagine most people
on NANOG have access at at least one of these methods for their main
vendors. Of course, some vendors don't make "end-user" kit and don't have
to worry too much about people ringing up we really don't know what they're
doing.
I've had the misfortune in the past of having to convince vendor engineers
from more than one company that I *do* know what I'm doing and that we can
dispense with the do-the-LEDs-come-on checklist - now I just go on the web
and order what I like, as long as I return the broken kit fairly quickly.
Saves me time getting replacement parts and saves the Vendor time as TAC
never have to see dead-hardware cases. And peoples time is money, so everyone
saves money.
--
Ryan O'Connell - CCIE #8174
<[email protected]> - http://www.complicity.co.uk
I'm not losing my mind, no I'm not changing my lines,
I'm just learning new things with the passage of time
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