On 8/17/06, Ilya Konstantinov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
marc wrote:
> Grow up, kid. Business-oriented work is NOT based on "let's slap a few
> scrounged boards and breathe life into it." You buy premium hardware,
> with VERY good warranties and service agreements and that costs.
>
Being in a few places which decided to get business-class hardware or
services, I had the opportunity to be on the receiving end of "good
warranties" quite a few times. While there's no doubt some companies are
golden -- the kind of companies you could trust more than assigning an
in-house person on the task -- most of the business service around is
mediocrity with a cherry on top.
- What good is having a business account at your ISP, if you can get to
a service person nearly without waiting on-hold but they're not really
competent? And is the fuzzy feeling of being business-class worth paying
much more for much less bandwidth?
Don't knock "fuzzy feeling". I had a client who actually stated that
"a warm and fuzzy feeling" was a requirement.
- What good is getting a business-class Cisco router instead of a
consumer-grade router, only to later waste a bunch of work-hours
figuring out that a new PC couldn't join your work network cause your
router was backstabbing you (Its license was limited to 10 machines!) ?
Come, come. This is either mishandled RFQ or obfuscation by a
salesperson. Had you known this beforehand, would it not have changed
your opinion of buying it?
- What good is hosting a server at a major ISP like a serious business
does, if they never actually perform the backup service they offered?
This is why SLA's are should be accompanied by methods and procedure
to check them. This is the clients fault no less then it is the
vendor.
They answer phone calls promptly on their business support line, but
they simply forget to do what's asked of them!
- What good is buying a RedHat Enterprise Server license if, when you
file a trivial service request, it just sits there and gets bounced to a
different service person every few months?
I have found that most placed don't get RHEL for the Redhat service,
but in order to have a "certified" OS for their application (e.g.
Oracle, VMware, etc).
If I'd be judging from those past experiences of "flying business", I'd
have to seriously consider: Perhaps if I'd shell out for a slick
super-reliable rack-mountable server from Dell/HP/Sun and then my
hard-drive starts misbehaving, I'd have to drive it to their technical
center, leave it there and they wouldn't even copy over my data to the
new drive -- and on top of it, it'd take just as much as it would in a
consumer computer shop?
Data protection is YOUR job. Use RAID and get an on-site replacement
agreement. I you (or the client or the boss), does not want to shell
out the $$$ for those, Then this is only to expected, and your are
better off with the local computer shop (or zap).
My bottom line is: you have to evaluate the costs and risks. If I had
my way, most of my systems would be custom made Debian machines, but
the cost of in time and labor, should something go wrong is high.
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Gil Freund, Systems Analyst
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