Hardware Maintenance vs. Self Maintenance

[Thomas F. Blich]

How do you make the decision where it makes more sense to do self maintenance vs contract hardware maintenance via HP? And when things get really tricky to call HP and do T&M for problems we can't resolve ourselves?

What are pros and cons?

Thanks,
Tom

[John Poff]

Hi Tom,

I think you have to balance the cost of doing it yourself against the cost of having HP do the hardware maintenance. Those costs include your downtime, which could be much longer if you do it yourself and run into a problem, and then have to engage the help of HP on a T&M job. If you can afford some extended downtime with a system and you don't have any money to spend for HW maintenance, then the do-it-yourself route might be the right one for you. Still, if you are investing the kind of money it takes to buy HP hardware and software, you'll probably want to protect that investment with their hardware maintenance.

JP

[Christopher Caldwell]

The decision is largely an economic decision.

If you have enough of the _same_ types of equipment and enough expertise, you could certainly stock spare parts and fix things yourself.

OTOH, if there's a fair bit of variability in your equipment (and you have a lot of equipment), I'd imagine that it would be difficult if not impossible to cost justify stocking enough spares to prevent significant down time.

If you have just a little bit of equipment, you might be able to "duplicate" the system in place for a reasonable cost.

You'll have to run the math for your situation.

[S.K. Chan]

It all boil down to how critical the hardware is to you business and how much you can afford (cost). We have taken the approach (in such a tight budget situation) to evaluate all of our hardware and prioritized them in the order of its impact to the business and then make the decision based on what's the allocated budget for this. Keep in mind you can have different levels of service, for example ..
- 24x7
- 4 hour response
- next day response
You have to also consider if your Unix admins have the know-how to deal with hardware replacement and recovery or not. Then again this forum is a great resource for that. Finally your other option (if you want to go on self maintenance) is to stock up parts yourself. For instance we have a few K's and L's that we purchased used and ready to deploy if hardware problem arises. T&M is an option too but for me that's my final option.

[Thomas F. Blich]

Do we know how much T&M is in general? Okay materials is harder to judge, but hourly rate for HP?

[Steven E. Protter]

We are a small shop. We don't have the human resources to learn how to take apart HP's proprietary hardware and put it back together.

The skills and training needed to support a five machine ship simply don't pay back in reduced support contract costs.

Add to that if we run into something we can't fix its a minimum $750 charge just to get someone on site.

We need certainty when we make a budget. Hardware support contract gives us that.

We now have our support rep's trained as to what our expectations are. We do sometimes have trouble convincing HP's Hardware management that when we feel a certain part needs to be swapped that this should be done, but we've worked that out with brute force(My manager calls them).

All in all, Hardware support is a good deal, esepcially with more modern hardware which HP charges less to support than old stuff. HP keeps parts in inventory for all supported systems and we've seen them fly in critical pats in production down scenarios.

So, we for many reasons are happy with what we are getting.

SEP

[S.K. Chan]

This is just last week .. T&M quote (just the labor) that I got for replacing a hard disk.
- On a same day (before 5pm) = $700
- After 5pm = $1800