How many of you IT professionals have been here before? Your budget is cut, your staff is cut and you still have to maintain your network as if all is good in the world?
You, are now the CIO and you find yourself and your skeleton staff having to scramble each time something as simple as a $200 hard drive fails and you have no spares on hand.
There is at least 2 of you trying to find the exact hard drive to keep the integrity of your raid. You are scouring the web finding someone that has it because the OEM doesn’t manufacture it anymore. You call a few vendors no one calls you back. You order online since you’ve FINALLY FOUND IT, only to get it drive to the location the server is at and it doesn’t work. Or equally as bad……………it was never shipped. So now that $200 hard drive has cost $700 in man hours and potentially $100 in gas and mileage. Now it will be time in returning the drive IF someone talks to you.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, while you discovered that drive doesn’t work you are having some kind of issue with a piece of software that the new and improved version was supposed to resolve and now you have 100 people screaming that they can’t access whatever it is they access and you aren’t sure because you’ve been chasing a $200 hard drive.
You call your OEM to get a price on support and either your equipment is too old, you’re only able to renew for a year, or that 1 year is thousands of dollars that there is no way you can afford. What can you do?
There is a secret that is become a bit more well known in recent years. The techs for the OEMs……aren’t really OEM techs. They work for 3rd party companies that are sent out on behalf of the OEMs. The pricing is still OEM pricing. A 3rd party maintenance provider can support an entire server for about the same cost of that $200 hard drive.
Sometimes it’s expensive to be cheap. Sometimes it’s worth it to spend money that will save you money in the long run. It seems like an easy decision. If you need more information, that’s what I’m here for!
VelocityAnne
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