Support Contracts (was Re: Paid Sun Patches)

Tue Feb 18 16:46:22 PST 2003

> (4) How much (worst case) does downtime, cost, per hour, to your
> organization?

The real nature of the word "evaluate" applies best.  Any problems that
you might consider the offer to be helpful against, consider their
value.

Whether that value is in vague, human terms like "Would your life suck
if it weren't dealt with" - or cold hard cash like "N employees times
T hours and normally cranking out D dollars worth of product/research
except when they are down" - or something in between like playing weasel
words about what really means "down" and what merely means "slow"...

A problem which a friend of mine likes to refer to as a reminder to 
management, that 2 + 2 = 4, no matter who'd like it to be 3, or 5.

If your corporate entity's life is in danger should it fail to keep
around the hearts and lungs A.K.A. [email|the database|your app's name
here\, then by all means get yourself some ongoing support guarantees.

Deciding whether that can be better handled by a consultant, the vendor, 
or by making darn sure your own people can do that job, is part of the 
things to analyse.  The risks need to be analyzed too.  Only having an
outsider know all the skeletons in your server closet could be a fine
way to end up in a pinch when he's called by 4 clients at once.  Having 
a vendor who won't offer patches unless you pay up might be something
you'd consider a risk if you think another vendor's products can serve
the same purpose.   Having your own people able to do the job might lead 
to a risk that they'll have to do that instead of the job you've hired
them for - but on the flip side, they'd be able to spot if a consultant
or vendor is trying to snow the company out of some extra bucks.

I'd ask a few more things about what I get for the contract.  Do I get
better patches, or the same ones ahead of others?   Do the patches
normally offer safe rollback in case of trouble?  What credits do I get
if I don't get patches that are offered, if my rep can't get back to me
and so on?  And is there other equipment which can do the same duty, but
doesn't cost as much (in some aspect: money, configurability, or time)?

I like to keep my basic policy simple:
	save early	(plan ahead)
	save often	(keep an eye on things continuously)
	save extras	(check that your backups can be restored!)

Everything else is an implementation detail.  Details are important too :)
To the one who started this thread, kudos - for planning ahead.

  . | .   Heather Stern                  |         star at starshine.org
--->*<--- Starshine Technical Services - * - consulting at starshine.org
  ' | `   Sysadmin Support and Training  |        (800) 938-4078