Slashdot Mirror
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
Duct tape.
I prefer local small businesses, they need you maybe more than you need them.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Hot spare.
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 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.
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.
I trust no one but Sony.
Now there's an honest, reputable, and sincere company!
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.
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.
always do like NASA, and buy the spare parts you need from ebay
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?
Heck, I don't even trust them to spell "tomorrow".
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
failed to reboot after a power failure, cutting off half our building
So your computer was like propping up some sort of giant guillotine? That's one way to get deadlines met!
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah, I get emails from AnySystem because I bought an Ultra 5 from you guys on Ebay. Overpriced does not even begin to describe your prices. I have to admit that the emails start off very exciting, telling me about the great deals that you have to offer, but when it comes down to price, I can't say that paying near original retail for a Sun Blade 100 that's worth, oh, about 50 bucks is very exciting to me (although if somebody pays you, I'm sure it's quite exciting!)
-h-
365 weeks a year?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Did they hire you for your low UID?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
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...
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org