Who does your server/network Maintenance?

[nicholab]

Who does your server/network maintenance? What do they do when they do this?

[Nij.UK]

how do you mean, as in manage and maintain? if so..... its all done in house.

[Ric_]

Me!

 

The only think that I tend to farm out is cabling because it is far too tedious and I know a contractor that can do a much neater job than me.

[alan-d]

Half of our servers are still under warranty the other half are under a maintenance contract in case we can't fix something ourselves quickly. Never had to use it yet but it's there as a backup.

 

We use a contractor for cabling who also install extra electrical points if required and the same goes for IWBs and projectors.

 

Everything else we do ourselves.

[DMcCoy]

*Looks Around*

 

Seems that its me!

 

Like Ric, I get someone in to do cabling.

[dezt]

There's me and another technician that do everything here, including some cabling.

[nicholab]

Are people allowed to go inside there servers with out breaking your maintenances contract? We have an RM network and maintenance contract and if you go inside a server you the break the contract. RM apparently come in and do a health check on the servers/network yearly.

 

If you do your own stuff how do you do it?

 

I am a young network tech who is mad wanting to do our own thing with out RM not all may be just some parts?

[maniac]

All our server maintenance is done by the team here (mainly myself) The main domain controllers and storage server are fairly new and have 2 1/2 yrs warrenty remaining on them. A couple of the others are still under warrenty until later this year, and I think a couple of them may be out of warrenty now, although these run non-essential services.

 

Some cabling we do, some cabling we contract out depends on the complexity of the job. All our switch gear and cabinets are wired by myself.

 

mike

[CyberNerd]

Servers are designed to be opened up, so they can be upgraded and cleaned.

We do a yearly shutdown for cleaning and upgrade if necessary.

Sad that you have a managed contract already, how much do you pay RM for their dusting services?

[maniac]

Are people allowed to go inside there servers with out breaking your maintenances contract? We have an RM network and maintenance contract and if you go inside a server you the break the contract. RM apparently come in and do a health check on the servers/network yearly.

 

If you do your own stuff how do you do it?

 

I am a young network tech who is mad wanting to do our own thing with out RM not all may be just some parts?

 

We have HP pro-reliant servers here, if you get a problem with them quite often HP send you the part and expect you to fit it yourself, unless it's a catastrophic failure in which case they might send an engineer.

 

Our network is custom built by the team here. Essentially it is a normal Server 2003 active directory network (with a lot of tweeks) running a program called ranger over the top (for the students) which allows further locking down of a workstation together with logging and some other neat features. You'll find underneath all the fancy web interfaces and custom programs, your RM network is essentially the same.

 

I would stongly advise against going without the backing of one of the big companies unless you have a good strong and experienced team. Without one of the companies such as RM or Viglen supporting the system, if it all goes wrong there's no one else to blame except the person who designed it. I've seen many a job lost because custom built network systems have failed to deliver.

 

Mike

[Domino]

We do all of our own stuff, including cabling, maintenance upgrades etc.

 

I've spoken to our account manager at dell, and he's quite happy for us to open them up, in the past he's sent out psus, drives etc for machines under warranty and we've repaired them ourselves - quicker than waiting for an engineer and he saves money...seems reasonable

[Jake]

As with a few people above, we do it all ourselves, including all the peripheries (cabling, trunking, network points, power points etc)

[nicholab]

The service cost lots of money I am sure it about of £5k or more but I am not NM. I which we could run on Dell or HP hardware as kind of kit always gets good reviews.

[FreeWill]

We maintain both hardware and software on the servers and all other networked devices. We also repair out of warranty cabling, but the rest is done by contractors, which is a shame considering I quite enjoy cabling; perhaps I'm in the wrong job

 

Our 'support' from NetLINC ends at the router and we don't have any other hardware / software support contracts.

[plexer]

My technician and I maintain everything here. Even if something is still udner warranty I can get NEC etc... to send out parts for us to replace sure saves them on sending someone out.

 

Servers we open up and clean etc... with no problems.

 

Ben

[pete]

We do everything apart from fibre. For new builds, we may get the contractor to flood wire the place, but this depends on past experiences with $contractor.

 

Servers are under warranty, and manufacturers don't mind us swapping the parts ourselves, even with the leased stuff.

 

If it's just a disk, we'll swap it ourselves - for server mobos and the like, we get a Dell bloke onsite by 11am next day.

 

They're fine with us adding extra hardware to a box as well, with the caveat that they aren't expected to support the added hardware.

[CyberNerd]

5k seems quite steep for a 'maintenance check' given that most servers have built-in healthcheck software and any decent operating system will email the admin potential faults. software like cacti and nagios do the same for networks. Ultimately we'll all be in this position, as the government puts more money 'into education' or rather into private contractors hands. I guess in a small school it would be cheaper to have the contract rather than employ a tech.

[ChrisC]

Are people allowed to go inside there servers with out breaking your maintenances contract? We have an RM network and maintenance contract and if you go inside a server you the break the contract. RM apparently come in and do a health check on the servers/network yearly.

 

If you do your own stuff how do you do it?

 

I am a young network tech who is mad wanting to do our own thing with out RM not all may be just some parts?

 

That's interesting, when a technician from rm came out to replace a backup tape drive, he said it was a bit dusty, and we should take the side off and spray some presurised air into it! This was while it was still under warranty.

 

Most companies seem to say to us "if it isn't obvious you've been in it, it doesnt matter".

 

Chris

[russdev]

Are people allowed to go inside there servers with out breaking your maintenances contract? We have an RM network and maintenance contract and if you go inside a server you the break the contract. RM apparently come in and do a health check on the servers/network yearly.

 

If you do your own stuff how do you do it?

 

I am a young network tech who is mad wanting to do our own thing with out RM not all may be just some parts?

 

I would check that out as far as aware yes can open server up but then if you go and break it can see that would be your responsibility.

 

What are you wanting to do?

 

Russ

[nicholab]

Put SCSI card in RM NAS box for back up solution so an external autoloader could be connected. I did phone up RM but they could source a card but I could not put it in myself

[ChrisC]

how much did they quote for installation?

 

Chris

[nicholab]

At least £200 + more engineer visit for day. Last guy we had did not know that they put RAID SATA drives in a server (NAS). That was when a failed disk needed replacing.