Critical software support

[tb03m]

Hi all,

Just wondering on your thought on critical software support. I have taken over network management of a school who have 4hr critical software (hardware covered under manufacturer) support for some of their server (e.g. SIMS and a hyper-v cluster). Anyone else have this kind of cover?

 

cheers

[Kitkatninja]

Hi all,

Just wondering on your thought on critical software support. I have taken over network management of a school who have 4hr critical software (hardware covered under manufacturer) support for some of their server (e.g. SIMS and a hyper-v cluster). Anyone else have this kind of cover?

 

cheers

 

For software "no", for hardware "yes". Well for us anyway

 

However it does depend on on your in-house expertise...

[localzuk]

4 hour isn't really much use in a school in my view, for the extra cost involved. We go with NBD for everything.

 

If you've got a Hyper-V cluster, its even less necessary, as you can shift the load onto a different box until it is fixed the next day.

[glennda]

4 hour isn't really much use in a school in my view, for the extra cost involved. We go with NBD for everything.

 

If you've got a Hyper-V cluster, its even less necessary, as you can shift the load onto a different box until it is fixed the next day.

 

When i was in a school I did this - and for low cost components such as Hard drives and ram sticks kept a couple spare knocking about - so as soon as a disk was noticed to have failed swapped it out with the spare on site and then called HP to replace the spare stock drive.

 

obviously things like SAN controllers we didn't keep in stock but HP had a spare on site the next day from the Netherlands which wasn't too bad!!

[localzuk]

When i was in a school I did this - and for low cost components such as Hard drives and ram sticks kept a couple spare knocking about - so as soon as a disk was noticed to have failed swapped it out with the spare on site and then called HP to replace the spare stock drive.

 

obviously things like SAN controllers we didn't keep in stock but HP had a spare on site the next day from the Netherlands which wasn't too bad!!

 

One thing to remember though is that the warranty isn't always as useful as it seems, taking time constraints into account. We had a Fujitsu-Siemens server that failed and it has a NBD warranty. The NBD aspect only applies to them coming out and *trying* to fix it. It didn't get fixed for over a week.

[glennda]

One thing to remember though is that the warranty isn't always as useful as it seems, taking time constraints into account. We had a Fujitsu-Siemens server that failed and it has a NBD warranty. The NBD aspect only applies to them coming out and *trying* to fix it. It didn't get fixed for over a week.

 

Depends on what hardware it is - HP warranty tends to be they will send you the part and do it yourself, extended warranty's and care packs usually do the trick.

[pete]

We use NBD hardware for most stuff. A couple of things have a 4hr response but that's because it's hard to work around a failure but it's not quite hard enough to make them fully redundant (nor is a failure statistically likely).

 

It comes down to sysadmin knowledge and the schools definition of "mission critical" and "acceptable levels of downtime".

 

Ask your SLT and get them to put a price on downtime for various services. Calculate from there.

Edited June 25, 2012 by pete

[dave.81]

Server hardware is covered by manufacturer and have no cover for any type of software. If we need support on the software side we buy in as and when we need it.

[tb03m]

thanks for the comments, I normal just have hardware warranty cover then software is up to me.