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Equipment Suppliers You Can Trust?

Posted by Cliff on from the maintenance-emergency dept.

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?"

6 of 379 comments (clear)

  1. When I Worked For People With A Clue... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Informative
    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
    1. Re:When I Worked For People With A Clue... by hotrodman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

  2. Two Words: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Duct tape.

  3. Re:Local stores by TheOtherAgentM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Clueless Mistakes by kawika · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Sony by Xeo+024 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I trust no one but Sony.

    Now there's an honest, reputable, and sincere company!