Sparing¶

Equinix Metal™ maintains an inventory of spares that can be swapped into our inventory in the case of a hardware failure.

If your monitoring detects a problem with hardware, please validate the issues you are seeing and then engage with our support team. Note: Equinix Metal does not keep an agent on a machine once it is provisioned, so you are responsible for monitoring the health of their hardware, such as disk drives.

We have inventory of both standard server plans and workload optimized plans available to swap in for failed hardware. If you encounter a hardware failure on any of the servers, we will provide new hardware to replace your server.

Using Spares¶

On-demand - If you experience a hardware failure in an on-demand server, and your workload is flexible enough, you can provision another on-demand server, migrate your workload, and contact support to clean up the failed hardware. You do not need to wait for support in order to start this process. If there is no available on-demand inventory of the particular server plan you need, you will have to contact support so they can swap a server in from our spares.

If you have production-level or workloads sensitive to failure, you may want to include provisioning N+1 servers specifically for you to use as a spare in case of a hardware failure. This offers you the most control over migrating your workload off of failed hardware.

Reserved Servers - If you are using reserved servers, you can add dedicated spares to your reservation. If you experience a hardware failure, you can activate the spare that is already a part of your reservation, then contact support to clean-up and replace the failed hardware.

If you do not reserve your own spare, we do keep enough spares of both standard server plans and workload optimized plans to swap out any failed hardware that is part of your reserved servers. Please coordinate with our support team to find a replacement. Allow for up to 1 business day.

Custom Hardware - If you have a contract for custom hardware, we may require you purchase spares as part of your contract. These spares are also racked, enrolled, reserved to your project, and in a powered on state, but placed into a maintenance mode to ensure that they are available as spares in the event of a hardware failure. When you have a hardware failure and contact support, they will help move that spare to a provisionable state.

Repairing Not Sparing¶

If you encounter a hardware failure and prefer to attempt repair before proceeding to a direct replacement, please contact our support team to see if this is possible. Equinix Metal will attempt to repair the hardware on a best-effort basis before providing replacement. In high-demand metros with dedicated onsite Metal staff, this can usually be coordinated in 1 business day. For metros without dedicated onsite Metal staff, this can take 3-5 days to coordinate.

Equinix Metal does not provide a migration service for your data.