Cisco is known for the rock-solid reliability and amazing technical support.\u00a0 About the only complaints we ever hear about Cisco is they tend to be on the high end of pricing, which is can be true when you don\u2019t have a partner like UCRight who will pass long the heavy discounts, and that they can sometimes be a challenge to program or configure without a GUI.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s not uncommon for our engineers to enter a client\u2019s server room, or datacenter, and see Cisco gear that is a decade old still happily humming along and doing it\u2019s job.\u00a0 Nor is it an uncommon refrain to hear from a client that they stopped paying for Smartnet, or just didn\u2019t care that they could no longer buy it due to EOL\/EOS, because the equipment \u201cjust works\u201d.<\/p>\n
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However, as we saw with Dell two decades ago and their infamous \u2018capacitor plague\u2019, wiki it if you don\u2019t recall, or as other vendors over the years have experienced in the past\u2026. sometimes things are out of your control and can still have a dramatic impact on your bottom line\/reputation.\u00a0 But how a company handles these issues is what really makes the difference both to its customers and its brand.<\/p>\n
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This is why we, at UCRight, were impressed by the acknowledgement and ongoing measures Cisco has put into place to handle Cisco\u2019s \u201cClock Signal Component Issue\u201d.<\/p>\n
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The issue first discovered in 2016 and later made public that same year \u2013 can be summarized as follows:<\/p>\n
A downstream provider, Cisco will not say which one or if they continue to work with them, produced components for Cisco devices which in this specific case have found to be faulty or defective.\u00a0 The component in question is the \u201cClock Signal Component\u201d, which is found in many of Cisco\u2019s products produced during this time including; Meraki, Nexus, Cisco ISR (routers), Adaptive Security Devices (ASA), and more\u2026the full list is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The defect or bug in this case is that over time the component will degrade and then eventually completely fail.\u00a0 The time line for this is 18 months after the device was placed into service (when you started using it), although Cisco has indicated it expects the highest level of failures to occur at 24-36 months.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is no field serviceable solution, or resolution<\/u>, meaning the only thing that can be done is to replace the device<\/u>.\u00a0 If left unaddressed and a device is impacted, this failure will lead to a completely \u2018bricked\u2019 device (i.e. dead, no recovery, no backup, no unplug and hope a reboot fixes, etc).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n However, like we indicated above, Cisco has impressed us by taking the high road on this one.\u00a0 What they have said is that they will replace any impacted device that was covered by a warranty or SmartNet as of 11\/16\/2016.\u00a0 We felt this was a much better tack to take then other vendors in the past that have essentially said \u201coh, you\u2019re not covered by a support contract currently?\u00a0 Too bad, sounds like you need to buy a new device\u201d.<\/p>\n Further, Cisco\u2019s transparency in this matter has been commendable.\u00a0 Whereas with some vendors you have to login to their site to get info like this (essentially treating it as proprietary), or go scouring the web for the info, Cisco has created a central repository<\/a> to address the problem, a concise list<\/a> to identify the devices impacted and a detailed FAQ<\/a> answer many of the questions partners, and clients alike, may have.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While I am not going to delve much deeper into the weeds on this one, I do want to point out three things that we have found some confusion over:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n