[Info-vax] Estimates of long-term availabilty of 600MHz DS10s

[abrsvc]

On Tuesday, May 15, 2012 9:54:54 AM UTC-4, Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <7996951.588.1336604713501.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums at ynev2>, FrankS <sapienza at noesys.com> writes:
> > 
> > If you have a maintenance contract then it's your service provider's problem
> > to figure out how much hardware to have around, regardless of how difficult
> > it may be to source.
> 
>    Right up untill the year your maintenance provider realizes he'd get
>    better returns without your business and does not offer to renew
>    your contract.

The quality of the service needs to be understood as well.  In my case, we were paying $2500 per month for hardware support.  With repair/replacement times of 4 hours that were never met because of the lack of Alpha knowledge, we dropped that service.  Spending 4 months worth of "hardware maintenance" money, I have enough replacement hardware (tested and verified) to replace our entire copllection of production systems with a few spare parts left over.  The cost savings along justified the purchases.  Having the hardare inhouse also means that the responsetime is less than 2 hours for complete replacement.

Along with the spares, I have standardized the configurations such that a complete machine failure would require just the removal of cables, the insertion of a replacement machine and a reboot.  Total time involved including travel to the datacenter:  2 hours max.

The replaced machine is "fixed" after replacement at the office and becomes the "hot spare".

The same procedure is used regardless of the actual failure.  Should a disk controller fail, the machine is replaced.  The controller is replaced later and tested again becoming the spare machine.

Your mileage may vary, but this strategy works for us and minimized the actual cost for continued hardware maintenance and support.  If there are different models at your site, this may not work for you.  Unless you have specific hardware requirements that force you to use specific ALpha models, perhpas DS10s or DS10L machines can be used temporarily to get by while the "real" machine isbeing fixed.  The DS10L is the same motherboard with memory and controller space restrictions only.  I have used the DS10L to replace the DS10 before I had the replacement DS10 machines wihtout any problems.

Dan