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Equipment Suppliers You Can Trust?
Steve Gray asks: "It has happened to all of us at some time or another. You're two weeks from deploying an application, but suddenly your testbed server falls over, and just won't get back up. After fighting with a variety of companies to try and get parts delivered for Tuesday, I'm finding that most companies will stall your order for days for reasons from random extra checks through to migration of lesser known species of Vole, business needs be damned! Who do Slashdot readers turn to when technology goes wrong? Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?"
When I worked for people with a clue there were always redundancies and spare parts. Now shops seem to run like the Petroleum Companies (claim to, anyway) and that is heavy dependence on JIT delivery of goods. Overnight is about the best CDW or anyone else seems to promise anymore.
Gawds. We used to have actual Field Service contracts which guaranteed two hour response time, and that meant someone was on site in two hours, not returning a call within that time.
I suppose HP and IBM still offer such, but if you're on anyone elses PC's or servers then you've dug your own grave.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As much as I hate to admit it, Dell's parts department kicks ass. It took some doing, but we're now part of their Warranty Parts Direct program and can order ad-hoc parts to be overnighted to us. I ordered 4 motherboards last Thursday and they were here on Friday.
Our dedicated farm of Dells numbers just about 1200 servers. Initally, we had to wrestle with them over every little disk and stick of RAM. Eventually, we just had to tell their support tech what we needed, and they greased the approval skids, shipping things out the same day. Now that we're WPD, we can do it online ourselves. It took me about 10 mins to order the mobos the other day.
I cannot praise Dell's 4 hour part and labor service contract enough. It is a bit expensive, but if you're absolutely dependent on any given machine and it has no backup, then the service plan is indespensible. If something goes wrong on the machine (generally indicated by the little green light on the front blinking amber) you can call Dell and they help you determine what is broken in the machine (if this is not already known). They then will have the parts and a service technician out to your site within 4 hours.
This came in particular use when one night a harddisk failed in the RAID array on a machine we were using. I called at 7pm and by 10pm they had the replacement to us, which was hot-swapped in and life went on.
Yes, and send someone who knows what to do whether it's a drill or a real failure.
One place where I used to work, a drive in a RAID array failed. No problem, they sent the new kid to replace the drive--easy to tell, it was the one with the red light in the middle of the array. But being the anal-retentive organizer he was, he decided to MOVE THE OTHER DRIVES OVER so the new one would be at the end. That took the array offline of course and totally confused the controller once it did see the new drive. For more than a week they claimed the data loss was due to a "rare double-drive failure".
Oh, and of course they lost several days worth of data because the last two tape backups wouldn't restore and the heads hadn't been cleaned for six months, but you could have guessed that.
We don't use standard parts. Almost everything these days is a single board with ethernet, video, and sound, plus all the other I/O ports you could want. When the board goes, you need another around. We are buying high-end Intel Server boards, so it's not likely that any mom and pop shop will have it.
Today's alternative is to make sure that critical services are functioning in either clusters or farms. This means that the loss of a single machine is not noticed by anyone not wearing a pager. Any other services are not critical and thus not worth the immediate sweat... they get overnight support.
Certainly, you can get 2-hour support, just ask the salesman for a quote next time you're renewing a service contract - but be prepared to pick your jaw up off the ground and possibly suffer from a lifetime of TMJ.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I'd recommend those above. Basically all large vendors offer taylored support contracts for large accounts, and standardised suzpport for smaller shops.
HP for instance has quite a number of different options available as seperately purchaseable support packs, including a pretty expemsive one with guaranteed time back so service (most vanilla support contracts only guarantee reaction time or appearnace time on site, leaving you with a residual though small risk that the necessary part may take longer to arrive).
You do plan your systems for a well defined service level, do you ? Else, someone should maybe start doing his job. Often a spare server is a cheaper alternative to high level support contracts - we often go this route. But keep that spare a spare - if you live in the kind of shop that happens to find its spare server miracolously doing mission critical work after a few months, you'd be better off to buy support from professionals.
Newegg is great for personal stuff, but this is a business issue; you can't wait a couple days for something to come, usually. Plus, when stock runs out on Newegg, they are sometimes slow at getting replacements (my experience).
Dell service plans weren't too bad when we used them back at college, but other than that, I'm not really sure. I've also been a fan of having backup gear on hand just in case; why build (or buy) one when you can build two for twice the price? (from "Contact" or something like that) :)
-Will F.L.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I hope I don't get modded OT for this one...
It's not a computer supply company and my personal experiences with them have been non-commercial and always to the same address, but McMaster Carr is by far my favorite online store.
I first visited it on a recommendation of a friend; we needed very specific fittings for a potato cannon that we were building, and the parts were nowhere to be found in any of the hardware stores we drove to. I ordered the parts on a Tuesday around noon, and the parts were waiting in the mailbox the next day when I got home around 6. I think they came UPS or FedEx but it was a few years ago so I don't recall exactly. I had similar experiences with the rest of my orders from them (2 or 3 more orders). Also, most of their inventory is geared towards commercial purposes, so even though my order was non-commercial, I believe that they deal with companies regularly.
Want keyed Torx wrenches? Want a fire hose nozzle? Want an 18" long 0.25" diameter drill bit? No problem.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Newegg: Prices are usually within a buck or two of best. More importantly, IMHO, is their website pricing. One of the things that causes me to recommend them is their honest pricing. The out of pocket pricing is what is in bold and the rebates and other price obfuscation is in small print (with the math done for you) if you really intend to get the rebate.
Not to long ago they tried doing what every other store does, try to deceive you with pre-calculated rebate prices in large fonts with the pocket cost in fine print. I emailed a polite letter that I was displeased with this format change and my opinion of deceptive practices and given the change I would no longer be recommending them as a supplier. They replied that it was necessary to stay competitive, especially with the price comparison sites. Nevertheless, a couple weeks later the original, honerst pricing was back in place. I doubt that my email alone was instrumental, but it put them back on my "recommended" list, plus I provide this anecdote.
CDW: Good pricing, for Chicago area great for same day pickup/delivery. If you get you order in before noon (not exact, contact your sales rep for true cutoff) their messanger pricing are on par with next day delivery. Will-Call pickup at the Vernon Hills warehouse is very responsive, I frequently place an order after 5PM on the web site and arrive just before 7PM closing and am back out the door in 10 minutes or less. If they would open an hour earlier and stay open an hour later 8AM-8PM, they would be near perfect.
Both these companies are worthy of your business.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
We had a SCSI controller on one of our Dell 220S RAID arrays go bad at 0200 Monday. Unfortunately, as it died, it wrote complete garbage to the mail database and hosed it. Cyrus' recovery utilities laughed at me. I got on the phone to Dell support and swapped in a controller from an offline 220S, forced the drives online and was back up. Dell offered to have another controller there within four hours (per contract) but, since I had another spare, I told them to ship overnight. It arrived today. After restoring from Sunday night's tape, we were back in action by 1400.
The morals of this story are:
1. keep spares
2. pay for hardware support from someone who WILL support you
3. closely monitor your systems with automation
This year we are budgeted to install a SAN and set up clustered failover on critical systems, minimizing the probability of downtime. This incident served to reinforce that need to management.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Nobody is perfect, but I've had great experiences with PC Connection for over a decade. For parts they stock, you can usually order until *2am* and it will be delivered the next day (i.e. later the same day).
My particular account manager has been fanstastic. When Airborne lost my order, she even had someone pick another order from the warehouse on a Sunday morning, and had Airborne deliver it same day (again, on a Sunday) so I could make a Monday deadline.
Brad at LiveJournal recommends Silicon Mechanics. I know other people who have been very happy with them as well. Their hardware is reliable, their prices are great, and so is their support.
Check out this thread on his blog for more commentary.
I'm pretty sure LiveJournal handles more load than most web sites run by the average slashdotter.
shoe
There are two types of people in this world: those that categorize other people and those that don't.
I really don't know how they do it. Quite often I can place an order before 10AM, and have the parts on my desk THAT AFTERNOON.
An incredible catalog, nearly everything actually IN STOCK, and friendly people who answer the phone and actually know what they are talking about. The prices are a bit higher than most other suppliers, but thye convenience is well worth it...
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There is a lot of value in knowing the dude down the street with the corner electronics shop when a drive or a valve in the demo fails 2 hours before said demo.
For the mechanically inclined, there's McMaster-Carr.
If you're in the same city like I was, you could order and one thousand reverse-threaded titanium compact swivel joints (real product!) would appear on your doorstep in two hours. Providing that's what you ordered, of course.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
and the slashdot crowd is doing it's best to figure out exactly what you want... (these half duplex conversations require creative license to figure out what the real question is) well, here's my 2 cents...
hardware and OS, i've had the best experience with sun, especially if you have both sunspectrum and sunsolve. hands done, excellent response time, even if you have the silver or bronze level(4 or 8 hour) response.
OS itself, once again sun, i've also recently been impressed with redhat. i was calling on behave of a client, and the person answering the phone was the tech i worked with, no dilly-dicking around with traffickers trying to figure out who to directo your call too. not bad.
commodity hardware(x86 equipment) i'd say dell, then gateway. once you've set up a business account and done a little business, you get your company advocate, and it's actually nice to be able to talk to someone who has a record of all the shit you bought from them. their desktop/servers are BTO, but replacement parts which are RMA'ed usually ship next day.
for random components and parts, microcenter. i'm sure tiger and frye's are comparable. it's nice to be able to walk in, scan the shelves, and pick up the part you need (HD, optical, memory, mobo, etc), and if they don't have the part you were looking for, it's easy to check out what your alternatives are.
keep basic spare parts on your shelf (HD, optical, memory, power supply, usb hubs and cables) and have a decent toolkit and a bin of itty bitty spare pieces (jumpers, standoffs)...
lastly keep a few online vendors handy, with credit card or corporate accounts available for bigger ticket items.
i usually rotate between CDW, newegg, and pc/mac mall. when i absolutely need a part sometimes i'll order from a couple vendors and either keep one on the shelf as a spare, or return the extra via RMA. if you are a regular, most of these outfits won't mind(regular means more than a couple hondo a year...) if you use CDW, they often have a supply depot in major metro areas, so you might even be able to messenger/will call your parts.
last shop i worked at we had 1 spare pc, 1 spare inkjet printer, 1 spare laser printer, 1 spare mac, multiple spare monitors, a couple spare switches, 1 spare cell phone, in addition to the spare components and parts. the pc and mac had a base os install and apps suite. if we had a machine that took more than an hour to repair, we'd drop the spare in it's place and promise to return the fixed machine the next day. i also always standardized on specific brand components, i.e. seagate HD's , kingston memory, sony monitors, etc, so when swapping out components became easier to maintain.
good luck with your seach for a new vendor...
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
This is probably not going to be a popular answer here. But if something fails and I need a replacement NOW, I skip the shipping crap. My first choice is a local (bumfuck middle-of-nowhere Indiana) small PC store, but they have short hours and no weekends. Stuff always fails on weekends. Second choice is the local Circuit City or Walmart. Not a lot of selection, but they're local and Walmart is 24 hour. Third choice is Best Buy, with two of them about 45 minutes away (one north, one east). Fourth choice is a PC Club store across the street from the northern Best Buy. And if none of those will work, there's a Frys about an hour plus a few minutes north. I've had no trouble with any of these sources so long as I stick to "name" product and don't buy "Wong Foo's Fresh-Off-The-Boat And Cheapest".
The only computer stuff I've bought online or mail-order in the last year is the notebook PC I'm typing this on, because I wanted a specific model that I couldn't find stocked at any of the above places.
And I do agree with what others have said. If its that mission critical, I have spares on hand. And when you use the next-to-last spare, its time to acquire more, don't wait until you use the last one.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.