[OpenIndiana-discuss] Good enterprise hardware

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Mark Creamer [mailto:whitetr6 at gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2013 12:19 AM
> To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Good enterprise hardware
> 
> For whatever it's worth, I've been buying SM servers for the last couple
> years. I had a motherboard failure and they had a replacement to me next
> morning. I didn't have to ship anything except the defective board once I
> replaced it.
> Mark

Dang, this is a recent conversation between me and the would-be sales person at Silicon Mechanics:

> He said:
3yr 24x7 4Hr sameday on-site warranty
We don't recommend this option, the 4-hour response is meaningless unless you have spare parts on hand.  We recommend Next Business Day with a spares kit.. The tech will not come on site unless you have replacement parts on hand.  If you are able to replace a mem stick, HDD or add on card.. you should buy just a spares kit and do it yourself. IF it's a mother board or back plane failure, most likely the box will come back to us.
 
Our warranty
3 years return to depot/advance parts replacement when available.

> I said:
Shoot.  Normally, "4 hr same day onsite warranty" means the vendor keeps parts available, and will dispatch a technician with parts, same day, for any and all types of failures - motherboard, cpu, power supply, whatever.  This is critical for business critical servers.  Never send back to a depot.  Business can't afford the risk of downtime stretching on for days or weeks.  Nor can they afford to simply buy two of everything.

> He said:
Thanks for the refresher in services. I do this for a living and deploy hardware to some of the major data centers in the u.s. and all over the world for some major corporations that have found value in doing business with us and use the support services that I offered you.  The reality is that hardware fails and we design that hardware to be as redundant as your application requires.. I do recall that the first solution I submitted had redundacy in mind..but you did not  see the value in that.

(I don't know why he said that, cuz it's not correct)

We and most of the white box integrators offer support through 3rd party services. It would be impossible for them to show up with parts for every system out there...take a look at the supermicro web offering and you might understand...  The cost of a drive or a stick of memory over lets say 4 years are minimal. You can buy lots of spare parts for the cost of the support level you want..  By the way, return to depot with advace replacement is a pretty good thing..

My suggestion to you is to go with one of the boutique vendors that are more in line with your needs such as hp ibm etc

> I didn't bother replying to the above, but the systems he's quoting me are on-par (slightly cheaper, but not dramatically) with the oracle systems including that level of service.  So the idea of buying lots of spare parts instead of enterprise support ... might hold true if you're buying a lot cheaper stuff, but in the present situation, I'm not seeing it.

If he wanted to focus on "advance replacement" as you mentioned above Mark, then maybe there would be a good solution here.  If "advance replacement" means they ship you replacement parts super super fast - like within 4 hrs, or even next day (including non-business days) then there might be an acceptable level of support here.  But I didn't even get to the comment about "advance replacement is a pretty good thing" before I had already made up my mind based on attitude and lack of support...