Stretching Servers Over the Warranties? (Refresh Decisions due to RAM Pricing...)

[Space_Munkey]

Morning All,

 

The warranty on our servers expire May of this year.

 

We're in a predicament now that with the exorbitant ram pricing, half of the cost of the quote is literally just ram (absolutely bonkers) and has put us a little over 10K over what we budgeted for.

 

We're now discussing options and one thing being floated is maybe just hold off until after april / new financial year or longer if needed..

 

However this leaves us in a situaton where if something does break, we're not covered in terms of replacement hardware. Obviously It's fairly unlikely that something will break immediately after the warranty runs out but not impossible. We do have redundnacy in that we have 2 host servers that will be able to run the bulk of our VM's should something on one fail.

 

I'm just dubious and also interested to see what others would choose to do (or are doing) in this scenario.

 

Cheers!

[TechMonkey]

There are plenty of companies that will give you third party warranty coverage. I have used Millgate in the past, MISCO do as well and I bet SoftCat do, as well as other companies, such as Park Place Technologies (not used but were chasing me for HP servers going out of warranty).  Depending on what you SLA you want they can work out very reasonable and much cheaper than first party extension.

Would be a good option to get over this blip if the servers are serviceable. My cynical side though worries the prices will stay put as companies suck.

[southhamster]

Depending on what the hardware is, is it worth scouting around for secondhand units or likely failures eg a PSU or 2? I reckon dave@ictdirect could be your pal here!

[synaesthesia]

I'm a fan of DIY and getting in a couple of spares if you can - PSUs and drives will be the things that go if they do. You might even be able to pick up a near identical twin server for less than a year's warranty. Our last warranty was just a shade under £800. Worth getting quotes, might those prices also increase if they have the cover the idea of failed RAM?

Even if you spent £X on a warranty, the quickest they will respond is usually 4 hours with a fix in 24. If you've the likely culprits to hand, that could be a 2 minute fix for a hot swap drive or supply or 10 minutes for most else. 

Bit of an insurance gamble like everything else really though.

 

Edited January 7 by synaesthesia

[DrBeaker]

DFe Tech standards / Meeting digital and technology standards in schools and colleges

 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/meeting-digital-and-technology-standards-in-schools-and-colleges/servers-and-storage-standards-for-schools-and-colleges

 

 

So your servers fail, parts can't be replaced due no parts availability? 

 

 

[jmak]

How old are the servers and what manufacturer? 

 

 We normally buy Dell servers and on the configurator they come with three years standard as standard, upgradeable to 5 online, but seven years is available if you contact your account manager.

[Roberto]

20 hours ago, TechMonkey said:

There are plenty of companies that will give you third party warranty coverage. I have used Millgate in the past, MISCO do as well and I bet SoftCat do, as well as other companies, such as Park Place Technologies (not used but were chasing me for HP servers going out of warranty).  Depending on what you SLA you want they can work out very reasonable and much cheaper than first party extension.

Would be a good option to get over this blip if the servers are serviceable. My cynical side though worries the prices will stay put as companies suck.

This is where my mind went - can you get a third-party warranty in place?

It does somewhat depend on how well the systems are meeting your needs outside of warranty concerns, and how old the systems are already. There's a huge difference between something that was purchased as "up to date" kit 4 years ago that still meets your needs and could easily have another two years third-party warranty vs. something that is 6 years old, was a bit underspecced due to budget in the first place, and has its rivets popping already.

 

And of course make sure SLT understand that this is you mitigating risk, not necessarily the 'new normal'.

Edited January 8 by Roberto

[5tu]

We use Park Place Technologies for extended server warranty cover and it's great value. 

[Space_Munkey]

Really appreciate all the points of view. @DrBeaker I knew there was some compliance caveat floating around somewhere that meant we couldn't just do this (officially... 👀😅)

 

The current equipment doesn't feel or seem slow in anyway, in that we don't feel or notice any bottle necking really. So definitely will raise going with third-party warranty to our govs.

 

These are the current estate specs:

 

2 x ProLiant DL380 Gen 10 CTO

Intel Xeon Silver 4208 2.10Gz x 2

192Gb 3200Mhz

8TB S2D Storage

 

I've also been comparing the quote we've been provided this morning and noticed that it's a quote for 2 hosts and a SAN. The SAN alone is almost £10k so now I'm wondering whether we might be able to save quite a bit by just sticking with S2D... I'm going to wait until our provider gets back to us with news from their HPE account manager to see whether a quote for S2D would be considerably cheaper. Our L3-L4 support is provided by MSP which is why they're essentially providing the spec (they'll be supporting it).

 

I've read some concerns about S2D and having only 2 nodes, but the reality is that we have been using it for the past 5 years without any real issues. Only frustration is that patching can be a ballache as waiting for the storage to sync up again can take a bit of time ~40mins

[willtech]

We use Warranty World had no issues with them. Warranty World – Extended IT Warranty Support for servers, networks and communication infrastructure

[Roberto]

When all's said and done, we live in an imperfect world and if you make a selection of S2D with 2 nodes with awareness of the limits/weaknesses vs. your budget restrictions, I think you could defend that choice on that basis. 

[browolf]

it's probably a good time to seriously look at offloading server functions into the cloud. After the last server refresh we insisted all staff data needs to go in onedrive so although we still have a lot of VMs they're all services and little data so much so we're now only using 16% of the san 😳   We're on 2 nodes but have more types of backups but in the future a new SAN definitely won't be worth it 

 

[garethEds]

We use parkplace and they have a remote monitoring solution for our servers and even our old P2000 SAN which is going well. I am often emailed about an issue before I've had chance to see it myself.