Save Your Job : Buy 2 Spares For Mission Critical Networks

What do you do when a critical device fails on your network? You call your on site maintenance company, they send an engineer with a replacement unit, and you're back up and running, right? You do have a maintenance contract covering your mission-critical network devices, don't you?

Actually, you may not need such a contract. And if you have one, you could well be throwing thousands of pounds away every year, completely unnecessarily, in fees. That may well sound like complete lunacy, but stick with me: there's good sense behind it.

Firstly, let me say that if your network is mission critical, and you don't have network engineers on your team, then you almost certainly do need to buy in maintenance support – or get network engineering expertise on your payroll.

If you have your own engineers, though, you can make significant savings by keeping refurbished spares on hand to cover all your critical network devices. In the event of a failure, your own engineers simply use the spare unit to replace the failed device, and the network is up and running again.

The maintenance contract fees for any given switch or router can be double the cost of a refurbished device. That means that if you hold two refurbished spares for each device on your network, your support costs in the first year will be no greater than they would have been with a support contract, and then for every subsequent year, your only expenses will be the replacement of any spare units used to replace failed units.

Over the life of the network, such savings can add up to very significant amounts. You may be concerned at the prospect of using refurbished units rather than new. Such concern is unfounded, though: this is exactly what maintenance companies do.