In total, we had two out-of-hours call outs last year. In Telco land this is exactly how it is supposed to be.

We have very little hardware tech. work to be done. - even including the routine stuff. When we do, like most Telcos, we tend to use contractors.

You can now get > 300 x E1 (10,000 channels of voice) in a single rack, including switching, SS7, VoIP Gateways, Transcoding, IVR, recording, CDRs, Database and control. Install it right and it will just run and run and run and run.

Spread your stuff over 3 or 4 Colos - and nothing is ever a dire emergency - but there are still a few things worth getting out of bed for.

In 2008 the total number of times we needed to send someone to one of our CoLos at short notice was 2!

The total number of times we had to go to our CoLos (including all planned stuff) was slightly more than once a month.

Like most UK Telcos, we have very limited requirement for work on hardware. So for most of the routine stuff, you hire contractors when you need them.

The urgent stuff is shared between myself and the only other hardware-aware Techie in the company who drives and has a car!

How many people do you see hanging around Telecomms CoLos ? By day ? By night ?

Hmmmm.

I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs - Server and Desktop.

On the Desktop, the Maxtor Story has been simply appalling. Fortunately we backup data properly and keep spares in the server room - so when a HDD dies, it's nothing more than a PITA. I don't even bother checking whether there's any kind of warranty. I don't want a replacement from Maxtor even if it is free.

On the Server - well I was persuaded to buy some Seagate/Maxtor drives specifically intended for RAID. Everything cross checked for compatibility.

Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason. "Hot Spare" prevented serious consequences, but the situation was not sustainable. A firmware flash improved things - but not enough. We've still got those drives lying around in boxes somewhere and give them to employees who want a HDD.

So we went with WD and their (very) top end stuff.
Result : Not hugely different.

Current policy here is Raptors on the Desktop. They seem to be performing well.

Top-end SAS only on the Servers and Raid. Even then only with every component fully cross-checked for specific support. If we are anything less than mega-fussy, it bites us!

A.