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Alain Hebert                                ahebert@pubnix.net   
PubNIX Inc.        
50 boul. St-Charles
P.O. Box 26770     Beaconsfield, Quebec     H9W 6G7
Tel: 514-990-5911  http://www.pubnix.net    Fax: 514-990-9443

On 9/24/21 10:37 AM, 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?

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)?

My 2¢ opinion / drive by comment while in the break room to get coffee and a doughnut is:

Why are you letting -- what I think is -- a relatively small portion of the time spent interacting with a device influence the choice of the device?

In the grand scheme of things, where will you spend more time interacting with the device; racking & unracking or administering the device throughout it's life cycle?  I would focus on the larger portion of those times.

Sure, automation is getting a lot better.  But I bet that your network administrators will spend more than an hour interacting with the device over the multiple years that it's in service.  As such, I'd give the network administrators more input than the installers racking & unracking.  If nothing else, break it down proportionally based on time and / or business expense for wages therefor.

Thanks for your time in advance!

The coffee is done brewing and I have a doughnut, so I'll take my leave now.

Have a good day ~> weekend.