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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 have 4 (mostly) identical machines: the only difference is the number of drives
in them.
3 of them Do Their Thing, mostly on RAID5 arrays.
The 4th rysncs the other 3 every hour and a few scripts for some tweaking (ie, postfix is set to defer all local mail) on some of the config files.
It has a slightly tricky lilo.conf that allows it to boot and pretend to be any of the other 3 machines (with those tweaks -- if there was a 'serious' downtime, I'd undefer local mail, but if it's going to be short, I'll just queue run it back to the 'real' server when its back).
A hot backup machine. A source of spare parts. A consistent backup.
As for who I trust: ASL Workstations (aslab.com). In the instances where we've had drive failures they've always next-day'd a new drive to us. If I -really- needed something Right Now, I could always buy a local replacement. It's never been more complex than mailing them the output of smartmontools whining about the drive failing, and the serial number of the machine.
I second this. My company has been using both HP and Compaq server hardware for years. Rarely do we have hardware failures severe enought to cash in on the 24x7x365 support guaruntee, but it has happened, and they have (both companies, even before the merger) responded in a very timely fashion. I was impressed. It was worth the money. I normally refuse to buy "extended" support of any kind. But in this case, it was well worth it.
-Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat-
You local stock of spare parts is the server sitting next to it that isn't as important.
;)
If your smart and buy compatiable hardware that dev server no one is REALLY going to miss can be a convient late night computer store
In my experience, its just cheaper to buy 2 equal servers and have one gather dust untill the other one dies. and you are not at the mercy from any hardware supplier. Having a service contract on your hardware with a company as HP is unpayable unless you are in a business where money is plenty..
The reason JIT and other issues have arrived is technology itself. Everything is cutthroat (and I mean cutthroat) and anyone supplying something with the best, barest of sales margin wins. You'd be surprised how much money can become involved in reverse auctions at the enterprise level. Suppliers' prices can easily drop 80%-85% in auctions with hardware's estimated price to be fix figures in less than an hour. Even into the 90s, the most advanced form of communication between field personnel and the home office was IBM with their bricks.
I know of a way to get something shipped with the shortest period of time:
When I worked in computer book publishing and we had to shorten the turnaround time for some books where it was mandatory for an author to see it in the latest stages prior to shipping to a publisher. Mind you, this was in the early-to-mid 90s when my phrase "The world's biggest secret club" was largely in vogue. The closest Microsoft would come to online use at the time was on Compu$erve. i.e.electronic communication was largely not in vogue, plus, this was hardcopy, not electronic copy.
Anyway....if we had to get something to an author, then get it back, we'd go to the gates at an airport, find a willing soul, and they'd hand it off to the stew-crew on a flight, and someone just had to be ready to pick it up on the other end.
In this case, if you could convince someone to do this for you and be ready for the pickup, you might get away with it.
I've not used this in a long, long time, and the issue of 9/11 is likely to raise some eyebrows, but if I were in a pickle and had to deal with hardware, I've got this technique tucked away in my mental index of ways to exploit how the system works.
p.s. There's nothing like networking and seeing if someone [locally] you know has a cup of sugar you can borrow.
I've never had any trouble overnighting and same-daying server parts; and in addition all the servers are parts and function interchangeable, so usually when something breaks I can either scavenge parts from something else, or move the service to a less used machine, and get the replacement parts in less than 12 hours.
I supposed there's cheaper options out there (actually, I'm less and less convinced of that), but Dell has been working very well for us.
sic transit gloria mundi
You Joke, but the company I work for as an IT Engineer routinely scouts EBAY, and classified ads for DEC equipment. We have a very large (600+ locations, across the US) distributed app that runs on VAX equipment. We are in the middle of phasing this mission critical app out, but until then, we get parts anywhere we can.
They pay big money to IBM for very simple services - guess what? IBM doesn't always deliver on their promise. Often actually. They are pretty let down, and I'd like to re-iterate, they have had a close partner relationship with IBM for a number of years not (at least 4) and they pump good money into IBM. IBM has dropped the ball far too many times now. They are looking for alternatives.
The fact is, you can't trust ANYONE but yourself. Have double of everything. I know that's a touchy subject with most people, because, well, that's expensive!!!
True, but I've been professionally (very) involved with the IT industry and data center industry for nearly 15 years (wow, has it been that long??!!) and what I've found is 'the best equipment' isn't always the best thing! In a lot of cases I'd rather have 'mediorce' equipment (nothing too fancy, meaning not too expensive comparitively speaking), but have DOUBLE of every critical piece of hardware.
Some may flame me, but realistically, this approach has always saved my ass. I build it into the planning of all our critical IT projects. Hardware that is (nearly) ready to go, that sits on a shelf. Hardware always ends up being cheaper than time and elaborate service/emerg contracts etc.
I don't know your position exactly, but that's my two cents. In fact, as simple and as stupid as this sounds, IMHO I think this is some of the best advice I can offer the /. crowd.
I've been bitten today however, all 3 of our internet lines SUPER slow. Bell came in and determined it's not our equipment, but theirs. They are having trouble figuring out what is going on with all our T1's. My customers are getting irritated. I put in a request to upgrade to fiber 9 months ago, they've done very little to get it up and running as of yet. Now it's affecting business in a big (bad) way! (I thought I was being pro-active and staying ahead of it all)!!
I second the motion. McMaster is awesome. My only gripe is that I can't seem to get ahold of a printed catalog (yes, I want this massive brick of dead tree). Alternately, you can go to Olander. My experience is that both have crappy websites, though McMaster's is a bit better. Olander's is totally non-functional (regardless of browser/platform).
As a mechanical designer who works mostly on computers, I find both of them to provide the incredibly valuable service of helping me select and source different screws.
Exactly. When you have equipment that earns you money, you pay for support contracts. When you have kit that will cost you a lot of money if you can't fix it right away, you have service contracts.
All the big name vendors in every field, Sun and HP in servers, Cisco and Juniper in networking, etc, have service and support contract options. With Sun and Cisco, you have to be within a 3 hour drive of their warehouse to qualify, Dell will sell you a 4 hour contract even if the server is on top of a remote mountain, they just don't honor it when the crunch comes.
Support contracts are just a required operating expense, like paying for electricity, or taking payroll taxes out of salaries. Sure, it looks expensive to bean counters, but to anyone with real world experience it's just a cost to be absorbed into the budget. All hardware dies. Always. Only the young, naive idiots think their hardware is somehow magical and will continue working forever.
Dell recently gave themselves a black eye on their 4 hour service. Someone in an anal-retentive data centre, where you have to fax in a signed authorisation form for every person going in or out, had a Dell guy show up 1 or 2 days too late for their 4 hour window. I was just watching from the sidelines, but it was quite a show. Server dies on the Sunday a week before Christmas, the busiest time of the year for online retailers. Customer finally gets Dell on phone Monday morning, they had accidentally redirected their support number to an answering service. They get a promise to have Dell onsite Monday afternoon, fax in the auth request, have the dead server sitting out ready to go. Tuesday about noon the Dell guy shows up, is not let into the building because the auth was for Monday. I got hooked into the discussion by the security guards because I support that network, and can authorise equipment removal. I point out that the service contract is a 4 hour response time, and the courier is responding "but its before 4". Much funnier in dutch, and you had to be there. I think the customer got 2 years support for free (or refunded) on all his servers for that fuckup, after being seen with the HP sales rep.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
When it comes to saving the day at a low price, the US Postal Service's Express Mail takes the grand prize. They deliver on Saturdays, for no additional cost (unlike FedEX, UPS, and DHL). They accept packages on Saturdays until early afternoon (in big cities, at least), and actually deliver them on SUNDAY -- for the SAME COST as weekday service. I don't think FedEx, UPS, and DHL even OFFER Sunday delivery as an option.
With Express Mail, you can literally ship something in the morning on Christmas Eve, knowing that one of Santa Claus' blue-clad delegates will be ringing their doorbell on Christmas morning to deliver it (and probably say , "Ho, Ho, Ho!" while he's at it).
For hobbyists who work on things over the weekend, Express Mail is a godsend. Find out that you need some part for your robot on Friday night after work, and you can have it shipped Saturday morning and arrive on Sunday.
Priority Mail is a close second, though. Faster, cheaper, AND more reliable than FedEx Ground (they really, REALLY suck... I've caught them literally lying about making delivery attempts when they were running late; once, when I was having my house worked on and had more than a dozen people mulling around the house, they claimed that "nobody was home". Bastards! They're RUINING FedEx's good name...) Best of all, with Priority Mail, if you miss the delivery on Friday... there's always Saturday. Unlike FedEx/DHL/UPS, who won't even let you go pick it up until the next business day...
If the machine has an RS-232 port and boots, I'd recommend an old version of LapLink. It had a remote install feature that worked by running a copy of command.com using a serial port as the console (a little-known feature of MS-DOS) and then piping the program through that to a file). You can then use it at both ends to transfer files.
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