This is a cautionary tale and one I urge you to take to heart.<\/p>\n
When you purchase a server, or any other piece of critical IT kit, you generally get a chance to purchase warranty coverage or extended warranty coverage.\u00a0 In many cases the vendor will provide a basic, Next Business Day (NBD) warranty that probably ensures you\u2019ll have some sort of response by the next business day (not, necessarily the actual next day; <\/em>if your problem occurred on Friday you probably won\u2019t have a response until Monday).\u00a0 What many of the vendor\u2019s may not tell you is that the parts supply might not be all that great for NBD coverage; in other words, an NBD warranty may not necessarily guarantee you that a smiling service tech will show up the next day with needed part in hand.\u00a0 All of that depends on parts supply and how the parts are \u201ctagged\u201d for warranty coverage.<\/p>\n Case in point:\u00a0 we (itgroove) are situated in Victoria, BC which is the provincial capital of British Columbia.\u00a0 We are a \u201cgovernment town\u201d and most of the Tier 1 vendors (Dell, IBM, HP, Lenovo) have hefty parts stocks locally to support government installations.\u00a0 I had a situation with a customer where one of their \u201ccritical\u201d Tier 1 servers blew a motherboard but the server was covered by an NBD contract.\u00a0 The server could NOT be down for any length of time so I chatted with the Tier 1 support guys about options.\u00a0 It turns out that there were full spares kits for the server type on hand in Victoria but they were tagged for \u201c4 hour critical response\u201d contracts only.\u00a0 Parts for NBD contracts would have to be ordered in from wherever even though<\/em> the actual required parts were sitting in a warehouse about 2.5km from my customer\u2019s location.\u00a0 I was told that it could possibly take up to 3 days for parts to show up, depending on what was required.\u00a0 Worse, when I inquired about buying<\/em> parts (as in I\u2019ll just buy the motherboard, can\u2019t be that expensive a part) the lead time was 5 \u2013 7 days if<\/em> the part was available for sale!<\/p>\n As the customer needed to be back up right now <\/em>we ended up buying an uplift on their warranty to 4 hour critical support coverage and the nice tech arrived with the full spares kit within an hour and a half of the support call being placed.<\/p>\n The bottom line, here, is that you really, really, really have to think about what your allowable downtime window can be in terms of a failed server.\u00a0 If you can live without the services that are provided by a particular server for 24 \u2013 48 hours then an NBD contract might be okay.\u00a0 If you have a way to \u201cwork around\u201d the failed server for a similar period of time then that is okay, as well.\u00a0 But, if you are like my customer and you absolutely cannot live for more than a couple of hours without those services, then you have to factor in the cost of the warranty uplift into your costs calculations whenever you are looking at purchasing a critical piece of kit for your infrastructure.\u00a0 And if you really. really, really cannot afford any <\/em>downtime then you need to be looking at ways to mitigate the problem before it even happens.\u00a0 That might mean having clustered or replicated servers, it might mean using Cloud services instead of on-premise services, it might mean having a sophisticated backup\/recovery system in place that can get you going again in a very short period of time.\u00a0 In short, it means you have to invest dollars up front to ensure you don\u2019t lose many more dollars because of a system failure in the future.<\/p>\n In my customer\u2019s case the cost for the uplift was $2600; the potential cost to them in lost business to have been down for 24 or more hours was many times that amount so it only made sense to cut the PO.\u00a0 But this is a decision that should have been made up front and not in the heat of the moment.\u00a0 They should have planned up front for this situation knowing that they could not afford the downtime.<\/p>\n