On 9/27/11 10:35 AM, Roy McMorran wrote:
Hello all,
Is anyone using a 3rd party organization for hardware support for Sun servers? In general we're
moving away from Oracle/Sun but I do still have a few systems that need support. Budget is tight
though, and I expect to be challenged on support contract costs.
Any recommended organizations (or ones to particularly avoid)? Other gotchas (like I know getting
patches from Oracle will be a problem)?
I think this is of general interest.
Oracle is making Sun more big corporation centric and making things more difficult/expensive for
education/small companies. Vendors who dealt with Sun have had trouble making the transition to
Oracle, and so some of the direct connections for quotes, equipment, and contracts have fallen down.
We never dealt directly with Sun, but all the equipment and contracts ultimately came from them. Now
we have trouble getting quotes, quotes for hard drives have a required support line item added to
them, the vendor has trouble tracking support contracts, and I recently found that some contracts I
thought I had in place were not. I understand there is a penalty cost for re-instituting a support
contract.
Access to Oracle for patches is critical. Waiting for the next free download of a full Solaris
release leaves you vulnerable over too long a period in an increasingly hostile security
environment. So there's really more than one issue here -- hardware support in case something fails,
software support in case there are issues with performance failures that aren't obviously a failed
piece of hardware, and access to software updates and patches. Cost and quality comparisons, if
available, are an important part of that. I could even be interested in splitting things up -- get
hardware support from a third party and software support at some level with patch access from
Oracle, assuming the cost/benefit tradeoffs make sense. Perhaps a competent third party vendor would
handle all of that, passing the appropriate piece through to Oracle.
Sorry if I'm just contributing more to the question rather than contributing
something to the answer.
--
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology& Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<[email protected]>
---------------
Erdös 4
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