🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <danpop.829148336@rscernix>, danpop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) wrote:

[...]
>If you're willing to pay the same amount of $$$ you're actually paying to
>IBM for this kind of hardware support, I'm willing to bet you can find
>a shop offering similar support for PC hardware.  The point is that you
>can actually save a lot of $$$ taking a different approach with the PC:
>with minimal technical skills, get a full set of spare components and
>fix it yourself, way before you will even get a call back from the
>service shop.  Without minimal technical skills, buy a spare machine,
>similarly configured to the production one.  In case of problems, swap
>the machines and send the broken one to be fixed.  This is still
>considerably cheaper (for PC hardware) than a hardware maintenance
>contract (for an RS/6000).

As a rule of thumb, annual hardware maintenence is usually about 10% of
the cost of the machine.  Redundancy is fine, when applicable, but
sometimes it's not a desirable option.

$.02 -Ron Shepard