[24hoursupport] Re: Any advice on buying a SUN workstation?
- From: Ron Allen <chizotz@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Guo Yawei <24hoursupport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 00:10:22 -0500
Hello Guo,
My experience is several (well, OK, 10+) years old, and may have been
limited by contractual obligations I was not made aware of. I was
essentially a low-level tech at the time, and wasn't in on any of the
decision-making. So take this with that in mind.
My one experience with SUN involved a server that no one but one
trained person at the company was allowed to touch in any way. That
one person (not me) was required to take an expensive training course
which basically gave him the power and SUN-granted authority to reboot
the machine when needed and be their tech support liaison. That's it.
Any upgrades needed or wanted were done by SUN technicians sent out
from wherever SUN technicians came from, at a very significant cost
per day plus travel expenses. Also, we had a hard drive in that server
fail once, and we got charged something like $12K to for the part and
to have two techs come out and replace it and restore the system. I
thought, then and now, that it was absolutely ridiculous. In our case,
it was a poor decision by non-tech management to purchase a telephone
messaging system to run on a SUN server rather than some other
perfectly acceptable PC-based solution.
I know that SUN has an overall good reputation as powerful and
reliable machines, and I suspect that the biggest problems financially
that we had was due to a poorly negotiated or perhaps non-existent
support contract. The company, which I no longer work for, was
notorious for being penny-wise and pound-foolish; or to say it another
way, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that they were happy
to spend anywhere from $10K to $100K or more on the machine and
software, but balked at, say, a $1K/year support agreement. That would
be very typical of the way things were done there.
So to answer your question more directly, I don't know if you could do
your own upgrades or not, but I suspect not. As I understand it, the
SUN hardware is all proprietary, although these days they may be
using off-the-shelf parts. And my advice is to look at the support
terms very closely and negotiate as hard as you're able to on both the
price of the workstation and the support contract -- assuming you have
no choice but to go with SUN.
My two bits. Hope it's worth what you paid for it :)
Ron
Thursday, September 2, 2004, 6:02:54 AM, you wrote:
GY> Hello,
GY> Does anybody have advices on buying a SUN workstation.
GY> I need make a dicision to buy a SUN workstation for my company. I want to
GY> know more about the hardware of SUN. Could I add hard disk or memory by
GY> myself?
GY> Thanks
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