RE: [SAGE] to buy or not to buy service contracts

[Dark Tachyon <darktachyon@yahoo.com>]

--- Dennis Viner <Dennis_Viner@kgi.edu> wrote:
> We have a 16 cpu Origin 2k with a service contract
> that's a little bit over $11K per year. We selected 
> the 'selfcare' option which means they ship the
> parts and we do the install if there's a problem.

Oh that's cool! That might be some competition for
MCE. Does self care include software support?

> Technically someone is supposed to be SGI trained, 
> but this has never been an issue. The price was

We swap our hardware in SGI and Sun our self all of
the time. No one can do the 2-hour on site support
here, even when pay for it because we are so far out
in the country from the vendors. I've had every piece
of two of our Origin 2000s out on the floor of the
data center doing hardware fault isolation. I kind of
like the look of a static mat floor myself. The big
mats are tile size so a nice checker board effect can
be achieved for moving around the room to get parts to
move between machines for testings. ;)

> based on a 3 year contract billed annually, but I
> was promised (in writing)
> by the rep that we could back out with 60 days
> notice. Based on our 3 years
> of experience with SGI, I'd strongly recommend the
> contract. We went through
> a 6 month stretch where the entire system would
> randomly hang about once a
> month without a dump. Impossible to trace and only
> solved by replacing the
> entire top module.
> 
> I'd say the software maintenance is also required
> since SGI has made it very
> difficult to get patch information unless you have a
> contract. They used to offer a great Varsity program

> which provide all the development tools, but
> that was ended last year. The new program costs
> about 10x more than Sun's developer program. We're 
> transitioning to Sun now, but the tradein for the
> Origin is minimal and it's still quit useful.

The Varsity program was great. When I was at NERSC, we
had Varsity support. Sorry to see it go. SGI is
putting another nail in their own coffin. We are
moving the SGI services to Suns and Intels running
linux.

Cheers,
Ren
--
Katherine Sauceda
Unix Systems Administrator
Lucasfilm Ltd.

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