On the other hand, there are so many potential points of failure to cover, many of which have significantly high MTBF that it is a tough proposition to cover everything adequately across the many spokes in the wheel.

Plus, if I was mister clever guy balancing the stores, I would know that there is also a high percentage of my replacement stock that is out of date a few minutes after unpacking it, undoubtedly the software/firmware and often the hardware itself.

I was just reading about some of the cool optical things coming out of Cisco for example, doubling the amount of data that can be delivered by polarizing (spinning) some streams of the photons, which can be kept separate of the original stream. That technology will only continue in the same way that the change in the way they built the magnetic bits of the hard disk has given us terabyte drives recently. Point is, I'm not going to over stock my back ups if I can get new cooler more efficient possibly cheaper stuff that swaps in just as well.

Anyway, just following a thought. I also have a 3G USB stick that gets me out of jams when they have an outage. I pay for a couple hours per month, and it goes months without use. One month they cut us off for nearly a week and I left the GSM on much of those days. They charged me up the wazoo, and we protested that they weren't delivering promised service and amazingly they gave us a credit. Score one for France Telecom.

Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.

Frank Delaney ~ Ireland