HP-UX third party support

[Marco A.]

Hi,

someone know about a good hp-ux support third party instead of HP ? and...what's the normal fee for it ?
We are looking for pay for it and want to be sure about a good company and cost-effective.

Best regards,

Marc'0

[Tim Nelson · Accepted solution]

Prices depend on the servers and configuration.

National:
northrop grumman
descision one

Midwest:
Service Express


We used D1 for many years they were great at bringing a part and replacing it. We diagnosed the problem first though.

Northrop is suppose to be a major HP subcontractor I heard.

Service Express, wait to see if others have experiences.

It would be good to see if you get any feedback on experiences on the above.

[Marco A.]

Thanks ...

We want to be sure about a good option and a very important point..., the princing !!

Thanks for your info.

Marc'0

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Sorry to be contrary but HP's support is the best in the industry. Whenever Oracle contacted me for feedback, I told them be more like HP.

You can save money but the best is worth every dollar.

SEP

[Marco A.]

I think that Steve, but I believe that hp is a little expensive . Do you know about that ?
How's the princing ? is that true ?

Marc'0

[Patrick Wallek]

I don't know how the princing is, but you are correct in that HP's support pricing can be expensive.

Even though they are expensive you do get excellent support.

I have always been leary of 3rd party support. A lot of them talk a good game, but I question whether or not they can deliver when you need them most.

A question I always ask is whether they have access to ssconfig to reset the system license information if a motherboard is ever replaced. So far, they all say that they'd have to call HP, which could waste valuable time if a system is down.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

(Disclosure - I am a HP employee)

I think you need to distinguish between HW and SW support here.

I've seen plenty of HW support offerings out there (in the UK at least), some of which seem to be pretty good, particularly on the low end stuff (not so much on cell based systems such as rp74xx, rp84xx and Superdome and their Integrity equivalents).

For software though, I have to make the point "who has the source code?" That's only HP, so it's only HP that can fix anything thats actually a bug rather than a config issue or whatever.

Many of the 3rd party providers actually back off the software support to HP anyway - the upshot of which is you ultimately get the same answer as you would have from HP, only slower...

My advice would be
i) Talk to your account manager at HP - tell him its too expensive! He may be able to be flexible...
ii) If you're serious about doing this, don't do it for your entire estate straight away - pick out some low risk systems you can try the alternate vendors out on first. At least that way if the old adage "you get what you pay for" turns out to be true, it might not cost you your job.

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

One final point... you don't mention the age of your systems. If they're pretty old then consider a hardware refresh - it's not unheard of for the cost of new systems with 3 years 24x7 support to be less than the cost of one years support for an old system (or at least less than 3 years).

HTH

Duncan

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

My company spends $200,000 a year on HP support for HP-UX systems.

Interestingly because we have 2 HP-UX admins on staff we don't often utilize this support.

However, we have a customer with which we do hundreds of millions of dollars in business with that uses big HP-UX servers for production.

We have needed help to support that customer and received excellent help from HP Response Centers in Atlanta, Israel, California and several other parts of the world.

It was worth every dollar we spent. Expensive? Yes. If you want a stronger engine in your car you pay more. Its a value judgment.

For HP-UX support I'd pay more for the global industrial strength support.

SEP

[Marco A.]

Hi,

Thank you guys, you are very experienced and helped me out to figure out what could be better.

If someone have another ideas!! just let me know.

Thanks!

Marc'0

[Jeff_Traigle]

I have a feeling that the quality of support from HP goes hand in hand with how big of a customer you are (and how much you spend with them). We've had many problems with HP support in the past few years. My coworker wasted weeks of his time trying to get the contracts themselves worked out.

The local CEs are typically the best part of the support machine, but we've even had problems in that regard. Even the problems we've had haven't been from bad people necessarily... typically former Compaq people trying to do work on HP hardware with no apparent training.

We gave all of our hardware support to Elite Technical Services this year. We were able to cover all of our systems for less than what we were paying HP to support half of them. ETS also gave us the option to store parts on site that we could replace ourselves. HP wouldn't even discuss that as an option. So far, I think ETS has done all right. I at least haven't heard my coworkers screaming about them. :)