Appliance RMA guidelines
Open Connect Appliances (OCAs) are designed for resiliency, including the ability to have multiple hard drives fail without a noticeable impact on delivery. At times, however, hardware performance might degrade to a point where replacement of the entire OCA is necessary to maintain the ability to offload traffic in a meaningful manner.
In general, RMA requests are initiated by the Netflix NOC team, who will reach out to ISP partners via email and request for them to fill out a site survey form to start the RMA process.
Our standard process is to ship a pre-loaded replacement OCA within three business days. The partner then returns the impacted hardware in the same shipping box, and Netflix pays shipping both ways, at no shipping cost to the partner. Instructions for how to return a defective appliance are included in the shipping box when you receive the replacement appliance.
Important:
- If we request for you to return a defective appliance, we will not set the new replacement appliance to serve live traffic until you submit the OCA return form via the Partner Forms application.
- Please note that the title to your appliance will transfer to Netflix upon Netflix's receipt of the Appliance in its designated US repair facility.
In some instances, we might need additional time in order to fully pre-load content for specific geographic regions. The total time until shipment from our US facility is likely to be 10 US business days at most, however customs clearance can vary according to region and country and might delay final receipt.
For some additional information, see this related article: Best practices for replacing OCAs in a site
Parts returns and replacements
As discussed in the maintenance article, we might ask partners to replace PSU or optics on an appliance. In such cases we will ship the replacement part to the partner, and we might also request that they return the defective part.
To return a defective part, follow these instructions:
- Keep the packaging box for the RMA return. Please reuse the same packaging material.
- Remove or black out old shipping label including the barcode(s).
- Place the return shipping label on the most visible part of the packaging box.
- Ship your package using one of the following methods:
- Via Fedex:
- Use your regular scheduled Fedex pickup.
- Drop off at FedEx. Find the closest location at https://www.fedex.com/locate.
- Schedule a pickup online. Go to https://www.fedex.com/grd/rpp/.
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If you do not have a Fedex Center close by, contact Open Connect Logistics. Please send an email to CDNL@netflix.com requesting the pickup. Include the following information:
- Pickup address
- Contact name and phone number
- Netflix NCO ticket number