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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?"
I prefer local small businesses, they need you maybe more than you need them.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Agreed. It's foolish to try to run a shop without spare parts on hand, especially for anything remotely critical. Time and experience has taught me over and over, that if you are not prepared, it will be made known to those who you'd rather it not be made known to.
What that overnight shipping costs on some parts would pay for the part itself. Keep spares on hand.
- Eric
Hot spare.
Yup, I agree with the above. In fact, I would go further and say that you have to regularly practice stuff like replacing a drive, or restoring a database to a backup server, to make sure your knowledge and procedures are up to snuff and documented.
I no longer work in the tech industry, but as a master distributor of industrial parts, we stock as best as we can and deliver overnight on request, but our users have to realize that we only stock what we sell regularly. I'm not going to stock a part that I sell once a year. The user has to take some responsibility and know what kind of down time he can afford and what the risk is of a part going down. We do our best to get stuff overnighted from the factories when necessary, but it's not always possible. The end user can only blame to the supplier to a certain extent, and then when a supplier can't get the parts to you, you look for an expensive, but fast solution. If not, you're stuck. There's no way around it. Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.
When our computer equipment breaks down, I like to go to a specific local store. They're 5 minutes away, carry quality parts at very reasonable prices, cheap "off the boat" parts are nowhere to be seen, they have a good return policy, and they speak ENGLISH. (This is more of a concern than you'd imagine, in a big city.)
My boss, on the other hand, likes to go to Tiger Direct and buy the cheapest crap they have on the shelf.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I wonder what the monetary value of this story is? It's essentially free advertising for companies on a website filled with nerds who order lots of equipment online and have no qualms about doing so.
I like newegg.com - and I wonder how much revenue they get directly attributable to this story and this comment.
2 o 3 spare hard disk, 1 GB ram, the hardware you need and the bugdet you have...
With the possible exception of hard disks, the part that is [overwhelmingly] the most likely to fail, and, several years down the road, among the most difficult to replace [because form factors will have moved on to new standards] is the power supply.
Always purchase several extra power supplies for any mission critical system.
What I have found to make the difference is relationships.
If you know someone closer to your end of things, and you can work with that person, you will get far better service. In support, it's the guy who says "here's my pager number in case you have trouble with this" even if he doesn't want you to call him every time you have trouble. The flip side of this is that eventually you know which guys break more than they fix, or close tickets without even calling. Knowing the local service manager or dispatcher is a real help here, or more accurately, the more people you know, the better it gets.
In sales, you need a Rep who will work with you, and has some power. I mean the guy who says "I'll get you some of those tomorrow" and you may not even see a bill for them (although you also might be billed at the real value - you NEEDED those, right?) This is the guy you buy your redundant supplies from when things are calm, so you don't always have to rely on him dropping everything for you. This is not the guy who won't lift a finger without a signed PO.
Contracts aren't worth as much as you'd like.
I found IBM four hour turnaround time to be an exception even in the early nineties, and it hasn't gotten better. Admittedly, we were the low end of the market, but we still had a four hour contract with IBM, and it was honored almost exclusively in the breach. I have not seen anyone significantly better since then either. It just doesn't happen. I have occasionally gotten stellar support from IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq and Cisco, but that was always completely localized, never reliable with any single vendor. FedEx has built their reputation on promptness and reliability, not becasue it's easy or common, but rather because it's difficult and rare.
Let's not talk about contractors. Some kind souls cannot be bought or bound by a piece of paper. Those things only enable them to help you, as demonstrated by random arbitrary work interruptions. You may not see them for weeks at a time in the middle of an urgent job, but remember that these kind souls, martyrs really, help you stave off catastrophe out of the goodness of their hearts alone.
Ultimately, it's the people who make it happen, like the FedEx driver who scanned my package at 6:04 last night as he got into his truck, and waited while I went inside to get a piece of tape from the the counter guy who told me I was too late.
I hope you get lots of good recommendations for companies that will deliver quickly and reliably, and I'll keep an eye on this thread to see what people have to say. Meanwhile, be nice to your office manager.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
If your company can't afford extended downtime, then your company can't afford to not have a service contract on your hardware. The service contract is, of course, only as good as the company behind it. That's one of the reasons for buying gear from the grown-up companies.
Most of our gear is Sun (~100 mid-sized servers, say 6CPU each on average), and production is under expensive service contracts. When something goes boom, Sun is onsite, diagnosing as necessary and repairing ASAP. Parts orders are delivered in one hour. This is how you run a business.
It's not expensive service, it's cheap insurance for the company.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"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."
Back then hardware was reliable enough that the manufacturers could afford that luxury for the few times things did break down. Nowadays, they want to cut costs to stay "competitive," and the first thing to go it seems is reliability.
I actually had a rep apologize for not being able to get a 2 hour response time. (An odd add in raid controller failed... at least they claimed it was part of the raid controller setup)
Not sure how much the vendor paid for that particular IBM contract, but the service level is quite nice.
The JIT model isn't so bad and it would seem some companies are building around that. I had some time to chat with the service tech and he was telling me about the shipping setup various companies have. Dell actually had a facility nearby that warehoused and shipped out parts as needed. (Not anywhere close to a Dell facility, but just a warehouse/shipping rig) It would seem he wasn't just an IBM remote tech, but actually was shared among several companies.
So this fellow can actually have parts ordered and drove out on a moments notice from at least IBM and Dell.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra