[sdw2003] why warranty older servers? WAS:servers from defunct ISP

[Michael J McCafferty]

	Ours is the same as yours is Tracy. I can troubleshoot and replace a
hardware issue faster than Dell or any other support/warranty entity. 
	It works when you have more than a small handful of systems which use
the same parts. In our case, we keep scores of disks of each size in
stock, a number of RAID cards, spare servers with the same motherboards
as those in production, spare switches, all routers and Internet
connections are redundant. This might not be practical if we had only
one server. It is definitely practical... in fact FAR better when we
have several hundred servers.
	If a box gives me more mystery than I want, I can (and do) move the
disks to a new identical system and figure out the problem later.

Mike

On Mon, 2009-11-09 at 14:34 -0800, Tracy Reed wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 02:28:16PM -0800, James Eitzen spake thusly:
> > This way you are not stuck in limbo if your hardware fails. Having spares is
> > good, but spares that are used can fail too.
> 
> Our corporate policy is just the opposite as yours it would seem. We
> buy spares and have employees who can do the swap. We also architect
> things to remove single points of failure. We can't afford to wait
> around twiddling our thumbs for 4 hours for Dell or HP or whoever to
> show up. So far this has served us very well.
> 
-- 
************************************************************
Michael J. McCafferty
Principal, Security Engineer
M5 Hosting
http://www.m5hosting.com

You can have your own custom Dedicated Server up and running today !
RedHat Enterprise, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and more
************************************************************