From: Michael J McCafferty <mike@m5computersecurity.com> Organization: M5Hosting Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:45:36 -0700 To: nanog <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: cross connect reliability 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? Thanks, Mike Does the colo let anyone run cables or do they have approved contractors? It sounds like a design issue to me in the way the cables are treated. In 4 years at a busy colo we have had one copper cross connect not act right. It would pass data but was flaky. We replaced it because it was an easy run just to rule it out. I am assuming your are in shared space. If so I would investigate your weak points (which I am sure you already are doing). Justin