3 ms·
That is quite honestly amazing turn around. Most people aren't in a position to get a replacement delivered from a vendor that quickly, but if you are, awesome.
by boulos 10y ago
That is quite honestly amazing turn around. Most people aren't in a position to get a replacement delivered from a vendor that quickly, but if you are, awesome. Again though, there's a big gap between simple, local storage (we could probably provide a tighter SLO/SLA on Local SSD for example) and networked storage as a service.
As someone else alluded to downthread: anyone claiming they can provide guaranteed throughput and latency on networked block devices at arbitrary percentiles in the face of hardware failure is misleading you. I don't disagree that you might feel better and have more visibility into what's going on when it's your own hardware, but it's an apples and oranges comparison.
- wtbob 10y ago> Most people aren't in a position to get a replacement delivered from a vendor that quickly Back when I worked in enterprise services, it was a requirement that we had good support contracts — 1-, 4- or 8-hour turnarounds were standard. If you're running a serious business, support contracts are a must.
- boulos 10y agoPhysically delivered, no matter customer location? Sign me up ;).
- nixgeek 10y agoI'm not sure why you're so surprised, this is standard logistics management for warranty replacement services. Manufacturer specifically asks customer to keep it informed where the equipment is physically located, and then prepositions spares to appropriate depots in order to meet the contractual requirement established when the customer paid them often a large amount of money for 4-hour Same Day (24x7x365) coverage for that device. This isn't how hyperscale folks operate for the same reason Fortune 100's rarely take out anything more than third-party coverage when their employees rent vehicles, it becomes an actuarial decision, the # of 'Advance Replacement' warranty contracts and the $ involved, vs. buying a % of spares and keeping those in the datacenter then RMA'ing the defective component for refund/replace (on a 3-5 week turnaround time). tl;dr - Operating 100-500 servers you should likely pay Dell and they'll ship you the spare and a technician to install it, operating >500 servers and you should do the sums and make the best decision for your business, operating >5000 servers and you probably want to just 'cold spare' and replace yourself.
- matwood 10y agoBack when I worked in a big corp with an actual DC onsite we had similar contracts. I assume they worked anywhere in the US as we had multiple locations. IIRC they were with HP.
- phamilton 10y agoWe had such a contract with Dell when I worked in HPC (at a large university). Since our churn was so high (top 500 cluster) we had common spare parts on site (RAM, drives) but when we needed a new motherboard it was there within 4 hours. Now, these contracts aren't like your average SaaS offering. We had a sales rep and the terms of the support contract were personalized to our needs. I imagine some locations were offered better terms for 4 hour service than others. As I learned long ago, never say no to a customer request. Just provide a quote high enough to make it worthwhile.
- emmelaich 10y agoAs nixgeek says, this is standard -- for a price. That said I suspect most enterprises pay too much; as in their money might be better spent buying triple mirroring on a JBOD rather than a platinum service contract with a fancy all in one high end RAID-y machine.