Comment by dijit
9 hours ago
it is often cheaper to buy a spare of something and throw it in a cupboard rather than have a support contract.
I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
9 hours ago
it is often cheaper to buy a spare of something and throw it in a cupboard rather than have a support contract.
I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
If you are only buying a single spare that is the case. Support contracts make sense when you would want several dozen spares.
if a support contract is 70% of the cost of something, then for every 2 of something a spare is cheaper.
For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..
Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices
Wrong. I've signed many support contracts that were negotiated basically to "one flat fee for everything we sell that you use, including future purchases[1]" for some period of time. Some people think that they 'optimize' contracts by pushing for "I just want a service contract only on the SKUs I have". That's not always a real optimization.
[1] Often, this includes a tacit "including things you are using that you didn't tell us about".
2 replies →
There are lots of different support contracts. Some of them really do cover the entire site. You seem to not realize the scale of a large data center. If every device lasts 5 years you are replacing 10 per day is not unheard of.