Re: [SAGE] to buy or not to buy service contracts

[David Parter <dparter@cs.wisc.edu>]

> How does your shop run things? Do you buy the big service contracts? Or 
> do you take the gamble and keep reserve funds around?

It really depends on the risk. Our high-end Cisco routers are on
maintenance, nothing else is. All of our desktop workstations are easily
repairable or replaceable by our staff, using either stock parts, or
occassionally we have to get something funky (for the Suns or Dells. I
hate Dell).

In your specific case, what is likely to fail on your new Origin? If you
lose a CPU and the rest still run, is that OK with your customers? How
much are they willing to pay to have all the CPUs all the time?

In general, if there is a single point of failure, what is the cost (in
time and money) of replacing/fixing it? What is the cost of being down?

If you can't have down time, then instead of a maintenance contract you
can either buy your own spare, or you could re-design to not have a
single point of failure. The tradeoffs vary from one situation to
another.

	--david