This is a summary of my post requesting information on maintainance
strategy for SUN SPARCstations, disk, memory, tape and network
equipment.
Our path is clear at this point. We will contract with SUN for
maintainance of the SPARCStations and work with third party
manufacturers for support for equipment such as terminal servers.
Within our company disk drives, memory and DAT drives are common to
both Novell servers and UNIX workstations, so our Tech Services people
will keep spares available. We have standardized on 600 Meg and 1.2
Gig SCSI disk drives and 4mm DAT drives - the SIMM memory would be 1
Meg and 4 Meg flavors.
I was surprised by some of the responses. This summary is in two
parts, third party support people tabulated by frequency of
recommendations and highlights of comments from respondents.
------ Summary of sun-managers mailing list
Third Party Maintenance Contractors:
Sun 6
Motorola 6
Bell Atlantic 1
DEC 1
Grummond 1
HP 1
Polaris 1
Comments from respondents:
1. Sun *will* support third party devices, but you have to negotiate
with them. This was a consistant theme - depending upon the size and
nature of your site SUN will work with you, but you have to negotiate terms
and conditions based on your requirements.
2. Buy 'spare' workstations for spares. The other comment was to be
sure to keep it in parts because if anyone finds a complete workstation
they will put it in service!
3. Software Maintenance - keep Answer-Line as a minimium for SunOS
support.
4. Sites which have SUN maintenance fall into many classes, but these
were the three most often referenced:
CAR - Customer Assisted Return - this was used by sites which had
in-house support people.
Next Day Service - this was used by most in-house maintenance groups
for SUN equipment and third party equipment was hot-exchanged with the
respective vendors.
Negotiated Service - some variation on the standard service agreements.
------
My thanks to the following, and apologies if I have missed anyone!
Andrew Mellanby <uunet!computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk!mel>
uunet!da.amdahl.com!mdh (Mark Harrow)
uunet!cirrus.com!tjt (Tim Tessin)
uunet!Princeton.EDU!rick%pgt1 (Rick Mott)
"SUSAN HRIC" <uunet!hcvax1.csc.ti.com!hric>
uunet!kahala.soest.hawaii.edu!bob (Bob Cunningham)
Steve Hanson <uunet!calvin.fnal.gov!hanson>
uunet!oceanus.MITRE.ORG!daryl (Daryl Crandall)
uunet!daemon.cna.tek.com!alexl (alex;923-4483)
uunet!kaman.com!mcostel (Mark Costello)
uunet!boulder.Colorado.EDU!chs!jeorg (Houck)
uunet!kpc!kpc.com!cdr (Carl Rigney)
uunet!isis.dccs.upenn.edu!pomeranz (Hal Pomeranz)
uunet!pictel!roadrunner!oliver (Michael Oliver)
Greg Higgins <uunet!mp.cs.niu.edu!higgins>
uunet!mcc.com!vasey (Ron Vasey)
Bill Hart <uunet!ml.csiro.au!hart>
(Frank Lowe) uunet!darwin.sfbr.ORG!frank
uunet!boulder.Colorado.EDU!chs!lon (Lon Jones)
uunet!c4west.eds.com!evans (Bill Evans)
uunet!physics.ubc.ca!unruh (William Unruh (Unruh))
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| Computer Automated Engineering Systems |
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