Comment by dijit
14 hours ago
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".
Interesting, I've literally never seen that (though obviously not doubting your experience) and I have (at one point) been in charge of 1% of web traffic..
I'm wondering if this is something uniquely american, because we don't seem to have much negotiating power in the UK/SE.
I'm guessing it is the size of your company or datacenter. You have to be throwing around millions of dollars to get the opened ended contracts.
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.