Last December I requested some extra money from my employer for 2 spare Cisco routers and 3 spare Cisco switches. I just felt it would make sense to have a redundancy in place. But they denied it and sometime this past weekend on 5/28/11 one of the pieces of equipment failed. Now instead of having another one ready to swap in I’m having to wait 2 days for it to get here before I can do anything.
It’s actually a pretty catastrophic failure as far as our network goes. It controlled the routing for our email, web page and for internet for about 50 people. Yes, we also act as a small ISP for members. Anyhow, here’s 5 reasons you should have a spare router handy. Obviously this isn’t so important in a home environment but it never hurts.
In case of hardware failure
If the whole thing just shits the bed you’ll need to put a new piece of equipment in ASAP to get the network back up and running. This is what happened to us. The router shit the bed and now we’re up shit’s creek without a paddle. At least until the new (refurbished one) gets here and I can get it fired up and online. Never assume that your hardware won’t fail, assume it will and be prepared for it.
In case of software failure
If your equipment is really critical sometimes just being able to throw a working system in while you take care of software issues is a blessing. Maybe you reload your Cisco IOS and for some reason it corrupts. If you have it setup to fail over to spare you just keep going until things are fixed
In case of user failure
This one should be self explanatory, but in case it’s not I’ll explain. When you fuck up (and I said when, not if) sometimes for any number of reasons you can’t fix the problem in short order. So you throw in your backup equipment, the network starts singing nice and pretty again and you have time to fix your mistakes.
Now can anyone tell me even one valid reason not to have spare equipment if you can afford it?