We have this network with a core of old and trusty Cisco switches. I have the gut feeling that they can go down at any time; that'll mean Crisis as this is the kind of infrastructure that:
they managed to build using only single points of failure. I know, you'd think some redundancy would slip in, but no
I'm looking for statistic data showing the average life span of network hardware. I need hard data to give strength to my arguments.
If that helps the oldest Cisco are from the 3500XL family. Some of them died in a short interval a few years before.