A sun-service guy & must buy Sun disks only. REALLY? Hard to believe!
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From: Colin B. on 6 Aug 2010 22:51 Richard B. Gilbert <rgilbert88(a)comcast.net> wrote: > Now let's be fair. MOST of the time, the service guy shows up, replaces > a disk drive, a fan or a memory DIMM, cleans up, and leaves! Yes, he > costs an arm and a leg but if your business depends on that machine, > he's worth it! Maybe you could do almost everything he does and do it > cheaper. Maybe!! > > If that first technician can't handle the problem, he has a large > organization behind him. He has a big inventory of spare parts. If the > spares kit he carries doesn't have the part he needs, he picks up the > phone and a courier is dispatched to bring him the part(s) he needs. > > Yes, you COULD do all your own maintenance! Is it economical? Maybe! > If it's your busiest season of the year and three hundred people who > depend on the machine must fall back to paper and pencil until the > machine is fixed, it's a disaster! Been there, done that! I have an interesting perspective on this. Up until about five years ago, I worked for a company that sold and fulfilled contracts for Sun gear/software. That is, you could buy Sun gear through Sun or through us (a reseller), and then buy support through Sun or us. Price was generally the same. Sun's policy at the time was 'repair the hardware until it was ready to hand back to the customer.' Our policy was 'repair the hardware until the customer was back in production.' That meant we did a lot of stuff (resyncing metadevices, rebuilding mirrors, etc.) that Sun didn't worry about, at least by policy. (and in reality, the local Sun guys were mostly great at their jobs, staying as long as it took to _finish_ the job, not just swap the gear and leave.) At any rate, we had the same back-end support as the Sun guys, so we effectively were equivalent to their field techs. Now, here's the thing: A drive goes down in the middle of the night. You can replace it yourself, or you can buy a support contract and have Sun come out. They can get a replacement in two hours. If it's DOA, they can get another one in two hours. If the system needs a firmware upgrade to recognise the new drive, they can do that for you. They have the knowledge and back-line support to deal with infamously flakey fibre-channel drive configuration, and also to do the 'stuff' you're not supposed to do. (Anyone else have to hand-edit the /etc/path-to-install on a production system? Yikes!) 70%, 80%, maybe even 85% of the time, service calls are routine stuff that a Best Buy employee could even get right. Once in a while, things go badly sideways, and it's really nice to have the back-line behind you then. One ugly service call dealt with gracefully can pay for an entire data centre's maintenance for a year. At least, that's the way it was five years ago. Nowadays, I'm not sure I could say the same thing. So many times in the last two years, we've called Sun because we're at the end of our rope, and discovered that Sun's rope is a whole hell of a lot shorter than ours. Support contracts with a functioning company are worth it if you simply need to be up as soon as possible. If you're a quiet little academic shop, you can probably do without. Colin |