On 9/24/21 09:37, Andrey Khomyakov wrote:
*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?*
Very little. I don't even consider it when comparing hardware. It's a nice-to-have but not a factor in purchasing. You mention a 25-minute difference between racking a no-tools rail kit and one that requires a screwdriver. At any reasonable hourly rate for someone to rack and stack that is a very small percentage of the cost of the hardware. If a device that takes half an hour to rack is $50 cheaper than one that has the same specs and takes five minutes, you're past break-even to go with the cheaper one. Features, warranty, performance over the lifetime of the hardware are far more important to me. If there were a network application similar to rock band going on tour where equipment needed to be racked up, knocked down, and re-racked multiple times a week it would definitely be a factor. Not so much in a data center where you change a switch out maybe once every five years. And there's always the case where all of that fancy click-together hardware requires square holes and the rack has threaded holes so you've got to modify it anyway. -- Jay Hennigan - jay@west.net Network Engineering - CCIE #7880 503 897-8550 - WB6RDV