Hi Andrey:

I work in upper education, we have hundreds upon hundreds of switches in at least a hundred network closets, as well as multiple datacenters, etc. We do a full lease refresh every 3-5 years of the full environment. The amount of time it takes me to get a switch out of a box/racked is minimal compared to the amount of time it takes for the thing to power on. (In that it usually takes about 3 minutes, potentially less, depending on my rhythm). Patching a full 48 ports (correctly) takes longer that racking. Maybe that’s because I have far too much practice doing this at this point.

If there’s one time waste in switch install, from my perspective, it’s how long it takes the things to boot up. When I’m installing the switch it’s a minor inconvenience. When something reboots (or when something needs to be reloaded to fix a bug – glares at the Catalyst switches in my life) in the middle of the day, it’s 7-10 minutes of outage for connected operational hosts, which is… a much bigger pain.

So long story short, install time is a near-zero care in my world.

That being said, especially when I deal with 2 post rack gear – the amount of sag over time I’m expected to be OK with in any given racking solution DOES somewhat matter to me. (glares again at the Catalyst switches in my life). Would I like good, solid, well manufactured ears and/or rails that don’t change for no reason between equipment revisions? Heck yes.

--Kevin

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+kevin.menzel=sheridancollege.ca@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Andrey Khomyakov
Sent: September 24, 2021 12:38
To: Nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Rack rails on network equipment

This message was sent from outside of Sheridan College. Please be careful when opening attachments, clicking links, or responding to requests for information.

Hi folks,

Happy Friday!

Would you, please, share your thoughts on the following matter?

Back some 5 years ago we pulled the trigger and started phasing out Cisco and Juniper switching products out of our data centers (reasons for that are not quite relevant to the topic). We selected Dell switches in part due to Dell using "quick rails'' (sometimes known as speed rails or toolless rails).  This is where both the switch side rail and the rack side rail just snap in, thus not requiring a screwdriver and hands of the size no bigger than a hamster paw to hold those stupid proprietary screws (lookin at your, cisco) to attach those rails.

We went from taking 16hrs to build a row of compute (from just network equipment racking pov) to maybe 1hr... (we estimated that on average it took us 30 min to rack a switch from cut open the box with Juniper switches to 5 min with Dell switches)

Interesting tidbit is that we actually used to manufacture custom rails for our Juniper EX4500 switches so the switch can be actually inserted from the back of the rack (you know, where most of your server ports are...) and not be blocked by the zero-U PDUs and all the cabling in the rack. Stock rails didn't work at all for us unless we used wider racks, which then, in turn, reduced floor capacity.

As far as I know, Dell is the only switch vendor doing toolless rails so it's a bit of a hardware lock-in from that point of view. 

So ultimately my question to you all is how much do you care about the speed of racking and unracking equipment and do you tell your suppliers that you care? How much does the time it takes to install or replace a switch impact you?

I was having a conversation with a vendor and was pushing hard on the fact that their switches will end up being actually costlier for me long term just because my switch replacement time quadruples at least, thus requiring me to staff more remote hands. Am I overthinking this and artificially limiting myself by excluding vendors who don't ship with toolless rails (which is all of them now except Dell)?

Thanks for your time in advance!

--Andrey