Reply #70: Dell for business is good if you're near a center or have DC techs on your staff. [View All]

[Xithras]

Our datacenter has Dell certified techs, so we don't need to deal with their techs. We had a Poweredge server lose an onboard PERC controller just a few weeks ago, our tech diagnosed the problem in 20 minutes, and with one phone call a new mainboard was delivered to our location at 8AM the following morning. In another case, a troublesome server with a transient disk issue was replaced in its entirety at no charge...we called them at 4PM, worked out that the server should be replaced in about 15 minutes, had the new server on location at 11AM, and had the replacement in production by 3PM. I should note that all of our systems exist in redundant clusters, so none of our Dell hardware failures ever impacted our live services.

The trick with Dell support, or any companies business support for that matter, is to be proactive within your organization. When our servers go down, our intent is that we support ourselves. We simply see Dell support as one tool we can utilize to accomplish that goal. The people who tend to have problems are the reactive users, who don't want to do any support or repair work themselves and want Dell to come out and fix everything. No support contract, from any company, is ever going to match the responsiveness and reliability of having an in-house staff capable of addressing these kinds of issues. It's also important to make sure that your architecture is redundant enough to permit a server to go offline for an extended period without shutting down the services the datacenter is designed to support.