Avaya withdrawn support for SSC cab's

[leosayer]

Hello,

We are being advised by our Avaya Partner that Avaya has/will cease production and support on SSC cabs. They have advised us to upgrade to CM3 from V11 to ensure 100% suppport continues on hardware and top end support from avaya.

This cost is vastly more expensive than purchasing a hardware stock of cab's and power units. We are perfectly happy with our current setup and do not need at this point to upgrade for any service issues. I believe the risk of hardware failure of power units and cab's is low, so with stocked backups we should be fine.

Has anybody got any thoughts, experience or advice you may offer? It does seem like just another way Avaya has of making you spend those $'s or £'s in this case.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[orypecos]

Avaya is partly doing it to make more money for them, but they are having many problems with individual electtonic components that they no longer can get, so it is difficult to support. It is happening everywhere throughout the world. Not just at Avaya. When Avaya use to be AT&T and they made most of their own individual components, they could support items forever. But now AVaya doesn't even make their equipment at all. They spun off their component division, and sold most of their other manufacturing to Celestica of Canada.
That doesn't mean that there aren't loads of equipment out there that U can use for fixing your system. But if U aren't good at fixing yourself, then U better find a good second party to buy a maintenance plan, or at least have on the line in town to help U out. Even then, licensing can be a problem if a processor needs to be replaced.
There are a lot of retired AVaya techs floating around that know all the ins and out of self support if U want to go that direction.
As far as new AVaya equipment, new equipment has new bugs in it that U have to put up with, so my feeling is, 'if U don't need the new features, then stay with the old.' Course, I keep my cars for over 10 years though.

 

[leosayer]

Thanks Orypecos,

I have a price on all the refurbed hardware at a fraction of the cost of the upgrade. Only had one Power Unit fail in decade and i have never heard of a cab failure! Processor is duplicated so I am pretty confident that we will be okay even if processor fails. I am confident of self fixing, despite my typos on the equipment. BP is currently just an expensive insurance policy on hardware really.

Business is 24/7 publisher so 'best endevours' is causing a little worry for my bosses. Are you aware of any cab failures, as I know you are a regular on the forum?

Many thanks for you post

 

[mikeydidit]

The old SCC and MCC cabinets are pretty bullet proof. Like you, I had very few problems that we could not resolve ourselfs.

Their will be a point and time where an upgrade will be inevitable, although that time may not be now. From working on these products for about 16 years, it may be better to upgrade a little at a time than pay for the full overhaul at once.

I read an artical the other day where Avaya is stating to deni access to the maintenance right's.
This would be for other companies that do maintenance on Avaya equipment.

I was in your position about a year ago. We, at that point had self maintained our G3R for about 6 years and were saving a ton of money every year. But to stay (somewhat)up with the changing technologies, we upgraded to the S8710's. At the time Avaya was offering a limited time offer to upgrade. It saved us about $450.000 to do it then vs. wait and pay the normal price.

"You don't stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stopped playing."

 

[gblucas]

Just want to throw in my 2 cents...I have had an MCC go bad. It brought down our call center 6 different times over a 5 month period. Avaya could not figure out what the problem was...We had a Tier 4 engineer on the phone for hours at a time, replaced carriers, processors, circuit packs, power supplies...You can figure it out...We thought that we had fixed the problem 4 or 5 times and the system would run a few days, and then crash again. Avaya never did figure out what the problem was, because they had replaced about everything there was inside the MCC. I still have a theory about what happened, but they have told me that I am up in the night. There is a cabling harness that runs down the back of the carriers that tie the carriers together (I believe they call it the "P" cable), I think that one of the connectors was bad, and it was causing the problem.

This problem is rare, but I have experienced a problem with the PBX related to an MCC.

For what it's worth...

gblucas

 

[johnnydialtone]

Do you use Avaya for maintenance? If so, how long of a term? You are covered until the term is over and after that preferably before)you can negotioate support. There are other companies that can provide maintenance support if needed.

 

[orypecos]

From my experience the main events that cause a carrier to go bad are: Power surge damages power supplies, and sometimes burns the whole cabinet(usually persons that don't have a surge protector, but not always. A lighting bolt will sometimes go through a surge protector) / Someone jams a circuit card in incorrectly and damages the back plain / filters are not cleaned or replaced / and water damage from the toilet leaking above the switch room.(ok, the last one I made up, but flooding or the airconditioner breaking does happen and does take cabinets down)
For those companies with tape backup I would say to upgrade to flash or optical. Tapes cause too many problems.

 

[leosayer]

Thanks for everyone's posts.

The Comms room is fully protected and I have to admit very well serviced in terms of location, power protection and fire. I'm the only one apart from engineers who physically deal with the switch, so I'm confident that the damage from anything is very low risk.

We are supported by a Platinum BP, but they state that any support will be best endevours, as if they cannot resolve issue, they will have to go to Avaya, who won't help on the 3GR in 2008(hardware side).

I'm confident that we will be okay and have made the business aware of my concerns and the risk. I would quite like to upgrade to keep up with things and test the goodie though.

Many thanks again

 

[lisalisa173]

If your contract is canceled with Avaya these days they are taking away many maintenance commands. I was employed at a company that was unable to busy and release stations. The vendor they used for maintenance was able to give us a Dadmin login with more rights BUT we all had to share the same login.
Gr3 V 6 cannot have a Dadmin login and it only worked on our V10’s and above. It was a real pain! No list measurements and many others gone also.
lisa

 

[orypecos]

U can do the almost same thing as 'busy/release' by removing the port in 'change station xxxx' and then put the port back in by doing 'change station xxxx' again. I thought that archive measurements were still available. If not, similiar if not the same data can be found in the error logs, albite not as easy.
Course, it would be easier if AVaya would just not take away the privages, but 'customer satisfaction' hasn't been something AVaya is striving for.

 

[lisalisa173]

Not as easy to do with Trunk groups and other items that sometimes need to be busy, released and tested..
Lisa

 

[mikeydidit]

If your BP issued you a DADMIN login, then you should be able to have the super-user permissions. With the super user permissions you can set up lower levels of permissions for other staff and create other logins. This is something that we usually negotiate in our self maintenance or Maintenance Assist contracts.

It will be necessary to keep at least a maintenance assist contract in place with either Avaya or one of their BP's to be able to keep the level of permissions that you need. The OP seemed to have the confidence in himself and or staff to be able to maintain their system and had a full blown maintenance contract in place. I don’t see these going away any time soon. People here still post about their G3I V?? all the time. These are good systems and will be around another 10 years or so before someone ask “G3R. What’s that..”

Oh and I started out on a lightening hit Demension 2000. That will be the G3R in 10 more years lol.


"You don't stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stopped playing."

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