http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/cable_wireless_robbery/
That is crap, sealing Cisco equipment for scrap metal. Those Cisco 6509 switches are hideously expensive. We had two at my old place at they are £250’000 a piece fully kitted out. The scrap metal value is tiny, this is a theft of top end network equipment pure and simple.
And they are not small or light, it took three of us to install those buggers into the racks!
How dumb is that? We have several 6509s and while they’re seriously chunky, they’re hardly worth a hill of beans as scrap. Not easy to offload as network kit either, everything has embedded serial numbers these days. A 6509 with no Cisco support? No thanks.
They may be no use but whoever it was screwed up a lot of important internet connections today!
We had problems today but only in accessing the internet through our networked PC’s, it also meant updating the public site through our CMS was acting up but the site was still running OK.
I’m a bit surprised that Sainsburys doesn’t appear to have any kind of failover if their providers has a major problem such as this? I would have thought they would have some secondary network that they could switch over to in the event of any unplanned down times, be interested to know how much it cost them if there online shopping facility was out of action for any length of time…
Switch cards like that are stolen to order, not for scrap metal or on the off chance of being able to sell them later on, can’t exactly eBay them. Getting access to them is very easy if you already have access to the data centre and getting that level of access is as easy as renting a single rack.
C&W claim the theft was from an unmanned site, maybe it was or maybe it wasn’t but they’d never admit that their datacentre security was breached unless they had no choice so I’d put money on it being their data centre that was broken into.