What’s demonstrated MTBF?
Disk drives, power supplies and fans are the most unreliable components of any system, and minimizing the use of components with moving parts is essential to reliability. The manufacturer calculates the mean time between failure (MTBF) of its gear by keeping track of the number of units shipped over time, determining how many hours the units have been in service, and dividing that total number by the failed units returned for repair during that time. “ShoreTel switches have an average demonstrated MTBF of more than 514,000 hours,” Gupta said. “ShoreTel achieves a high MTBF with a switch design that uses high reliability components, such as flash memory instead of disk drives.” 4. What’s the recovery time? A repair that takes one hour means far less downtime than a repair that takes four hours. The more complicated the system, the longer it takes to identify the problem, replace the failed component and restore communications service. Chassis systems can be complicated to troubleshoot a
