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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.
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