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

[Jenn Sturm <jsturm@hamilton.edu>]

One of the things that makes this situation difficult is that I am a 
one admin shop. So all of the parts swapping is done by me. I'm 
hardware savvy, and can be talked through anything, so that doesn't 
worry me, but we're certainly too small to keep spare parts on site and 
it also helps when someone can come fix it and I can save my time for 
other work.

On the other hand, we're not  a mission-critical shop. Our site does 
computational chemistry research with faculty and students at seven 
colleges, and the worst that will happen is that someone's work will be 
delayed.

Everyone's had lots of compelling reasons to go in any of various 
directions. And I've also gotten great advice so far on new ways (for 
me) to consider the big pictures involved in making this decision.

Numerous folks have written to me to suggest that I find a new vendor 
since I don't even have the actual quote in my hand yet. Our current 
vendor has been this way since the beginning, and I can't get a good 
answer as to why they're our primary vendor in the first place (other 
than the fact that since we're in a rural area they're the only folks 
within a couple of hours of here). I will definitely look into that 
option, though, and will also look into the option of lowering the 
service. We definitely don't need more than selfcare.

I'll also try calling MCE, since they sound like a great option.

Thanks all for the great advice (and definitely keep it coming if 
you've got more!).


On Friday, January 10, 2003, at 02:05  PM, Dark Tachyon wrote:

>
> --- Dennis Viner <Dennis_Viner@kgi.edu> wrote:
>> We have a 16 cpu Origin 2k with a service contract
>> that's a little bit over $11K per year. We selected
>> the 'selfcare' option which means they ship the
>> parts and we do the install if there's a problem.
>
> Oh that's cool! That might be some competition for
> MCE. Does self care include software support?
>
>> Technically someone is supposed to be SGI trained,
>> but this has never been an issue. The price was
>
> We swap our hardware in SGI and Sun our self all of
> the time. No one can do the 2-hour on site support
> here, even when pay for it because we are so far out
> in the country from the vendors. I've had every piece
> of two of our Origin 2000s out on the floor of the
> data center doing hardware fault isolation. I kind of
> like the look of a static mat floor myself. The big
> mats are tile size so a nice checker board effect can
> be achieved for moving around the room to get parts to
> move between machines for testings. ;)
>
>> based on a 3 year contract billed annually, but I
>> was promised (in writing)
>> by the rep that we could back out with 60 days
>> notice. Based on our 3 years
>> of experience with SGI, I'd strongly recommend the
>> contract. We went through
>> a 6 month stretch where the entire system would
>> randomly hang about once a
>> month without a dump. Impossible to trace and only
>> solved by replacing the
>> entire top module.
>>
>> I'd say the software maintenance is also required
>> since SGI has made it very
>> difficult to get patch information unless you have a
>> contract. They used to offer a great Varsity program
>
>> which provide all the development tools, but
>> that was ended last year. The new program costs
>> about 10x more than Sun's developer program. We're
>> transitioning to Sun now, but the tradein for the
>> Origin is minimal and it's still quit useful.
>
> The Varsity program was great. When I was at NERSC, we
> had Varsity support. Sorry to see it go. SGI is
> putting another nail in their own coffin. We are
> moving the SGI services to Suns and Intels running
> linux.
>
> Cheers,
> Ren
> --
> Katherine Sauceda
> Unix Systems Administrator
> Lucasfilm Ltd.
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
> http://mailplus.yahoo.com
>


___________
Jennifer Sturm
System Administrator and Research Support Specialist
Chemistry Department
Hamilton College
198 College Hill Road
Clinton, NY 13323

tel: 315-859-4745
fax: 315-859-4744

jsturm@hamilton.edu

http://www.chem.hamilton.edu/
http://mars.chem.hamilton.edu/