The argument for official support vs third party support
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@dustinb3403 said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
I think it's a critically important conversation to have. Support is support, it's primary benefit shouldn't be to fix bugs in the software you paid for.
It is there to make sure that if your system goes belly up, that you have the support you need to be rectified and functional within the time frame that you planned for.I'd argue where we are going should be for people to predict that an environment is going to go boom and fix it beforehand. MSP's tried to prevent this by doing various things (we did SNMP monitoring, WMI, log analytics and pattern matching for previous issues we had found), but the scale that some of these guys can do. https://www.nimblestorage.com/technology-products/infosight/ 86% fixing problem before impact is pretty damn impressive, as well as the ability to RCA things that are not exactly "their bag/fault" is where stuff is going. Just pointing a finger at the network isn't a solution. Mapping what's wrong (and then assisting with fixing it) is the future. Vendors are starting to bleed into the MSP's capabilities here (and do it better given the size of the data they can collect).
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Microsoft doesn't even offer support in the SMB
They offer pay per ticket support. It's questionable the quality, but it does exist and if you find a bug they give you your money back (We rarely paid for tickets, but sadly it took weeks to get resolution sometimes).
The issue of paid vendor support isn't that a bug that's critical will not get fixed, it's just it may not get fixed in the timetable you need. Paying for expediency shouldn't be that shocking. We had a Brocade switch that we found a nasty RSTP bug in. We had a hotfix the same day. I found similar bugs in a Linksys switch. I never saw a resolution on it (They just didn't care). A Red Escalation (Priority 1 bug) from a paying customer will trigger engineers to work weekends and get overtime pay. A report from someone in a forum having an issue will get a "send me the logs and I'll look at it when I can" from most vendors.
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@storageninja said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Microsoft doesn't even offer support in the SMB
They offer pay per ticket support. It's questionable the quality, but it does exist and if you find a bug they give you your money back (We rarely paid for tickets, but sadly it took weeks to get resolution sometimes).
The issue of paid vendor support isn't that a bug that's critical will not get fixed, it's just it may not get fixed in the timetable you need. Paying for expediency shouldn't be that shocking. We had a Brocade switch that we found a nasty RSTP bug in. We had a hotfix the same day. I found similar bugs in a Linksys switch. I never saw a resolution on it (They just didn't care). A Red Escalation (Priority 1 bug) from a paying customer will trigger engineers to work weekends and get overtime pay. A report from someone in a forum having an issue will get a "send me the logs and I'll look at it when I can" from most vendors.
That was my point, they offer it AFTER you find a bug and they can decline it AFTER you are stuck with them.
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
That was my point, they offer it AFTER you find a bug and they can decline it AFTER you are stuck with them
Not all companies subscribe to the first rule of acquisition. Gint was wise, but software vendors tend to not be that bad. I have seen this happen, but it tends to be with vendors who are more concerned about their next customer than their existing ones for revenue. Your large enterprise vendors (Redhat, Juniper, HDS, Oracle, VMware) tend to not do this. Startups and hardware vendors tend to be the worst offenders (Hardware because it can cost them a lot for a recall like the Intel Clock issue that impacted the Atoms), and startups because they may realize that their first 100 customers are not going to be the kind of customers or industry that gets them to 10K customers and they will "Pivot" and abandon a field.
The reality is depending on the platform the labor to migrate (or to account for missing capabilities) isn't free. I've seen people replatform their monitoring system every 3 months. This just isn't a good idea as the value of the monitoring solution tends to come from the time invested in customization and training etc.
What's your reaction if you hit a buggy driver from Intel. Buy a different NIC, or call the vendor to see if you can get a fix or a workaround for it? That I guess fundamentally determines if you're the kind of person who buys vendors support.
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@storageninja said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
What's your reaction if you hit a buggy driver from Intel. Buy a different NIC, or call the vendor to see if you can get a fix or a workaround for it? That I guess fundamentally determines if you're the kind of person who buys vendors support.
This is dependent on the cost of the system that is reliant on this NIC. If it possible to get a different model NIC for $1000 that will work, but it would cost you 3 days of down time to get the part-in and installed.
Is it worth it?
Can the vendor supply you a patched driver before then? Is the vendor charging you to create a custom driver? Can the vendor even get a working driver to you faster than you can get the part?
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@storageninja said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
What's your reaction if you hit a buggy driver from Intel. Buy a different NIC, or call the vendor to see if you can get a fix or a workaround for it? That I guess fundamentally determines if you're the kind of person who buys vendors support.
Commodity parts, get one that works and move on. Paying for unique support and code changes to support a single SMB use case rarely works. As Dustin points out, I can swap the part in an hour. I can't get support to understand what the issue is in that amount of time. Vendor support, in that example, represents high cost and high risk. I know that I can swap parts and that I can swap them now. I don't know if the vendor can fix the issue or if they will in any reasonable amount of time.
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@scottalanmiller It is the value of time spent troubleshooting vs time spent replacing. Sometimes it makes more sense to replace something than try and figure out what it is. If I spend 2 hours trying to figure something out on a $100 printer, I should have just replaced it.
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@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller It is the value of time spent troubleshooting vs time spent replacing. Sometimes it makes more sense to replace something than try and figure out what it is. If I spend 2 hours trying to figure something out on a $100 printer, I should have just replaced it.
Yup, which is often the case with operating systems, too!
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller It is the value of time spent troubleshooting vs time spent replacing. Sometimes it makes more sense to replace something than try and figure out what it is. If I spend 2 hours trying to figure something out on a $100 printer, I should have just replaced it.
Yup, which is often the case with operating systems, too!
Exactly. A re-image solves almost everything.
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@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller It is the value of time spent troubleshooting vs time spent replacing. Sometimes it makes more sense to replace something than try and figure out what it is. If I spend 2 hours trying to figure something out on a $100 printer, I should have just replaced it.
Yup, which is often the case with operating systems, too!
Exactly. A re-image solves almost everything.
Yup, the DevOps philosphy. Rebuilt to know good rather than trying to troubleshoot the unknown.
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Obviously, there is value to knowing why something occurred. For instance, when it occurs repeatedly. Then you have to identify the root cause.
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@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Obviously, there is value to knowing why something occurred. For instance, when it occurs repeatedly. Then you have to identify the root cause.
When I have an extra desktop or laptop ready for deployment. I usually just swap the machine and then take my time to identify the issue.
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@black3dynamite said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Obviously, there is value to knowing why something occurred. For instance, when it occurs repeatedly. Then you have to identify the root cause.
When I have an extra desktop or laptop ready for deployment. I usually just swap the machine and then take my time to identify the issue.
I try to be in that position too. That is a good position to be in.
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@black3dynamite said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Obviously, there is value to knowing why something occurred. For instance, when it occurs repeatedly. Then you have to identify the root cause.
When I have an extra desktop or laptop ready for deployment. I usually just swap the machine and then take my time to identify the issue.
Same with a hard drive. In a lot of cases, having parts available is far more reliable, faster, and cheaper than a warranty from a vendor.
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@black3dynamite said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Obviously, there is value to knowing why something occurred. For instance, when it occurs repeatedly. Then you have to identify the root cause.
When I have an extra desktop or laptop ready for deployment. I usually just swap the machine and then take my time to identify the issue.
Same with a hard drive. In a lot of cases, having parts available is far more reliable, faster, and cheaper than a warranty from a vendor.
True story. I just bought a 12-bay Synology and 14 identical drives.
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@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@black3dynamite said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Obviously, there is value to knowing why something occurred. For instance, when it occurs repeatedly. Then you have to identify the root cause.
When I have an extra desktop or laptop ready for deployment. I usually just swap the machine and then take my time to identify the issue.
Same with a hard drive. In a lot of cases, having parts available is far more reliable, faster, and cheaper than a warranty from a vendor.
True story. I just bought a 12-bay Synology and 14 identical drives.
I lean more and more to this all of the time. MOre often than not, vendors fail to deliver on their support promises anyway.
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@wrx7m said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller It is the value of time spent troubleshooting vs time spent replacing. Sometimes it makes more sense to replace something than try and figure out what it is. If I spend 2 hours trying to figure something out on a $100 printer, I should have just replaced it.
Yup, which is often the case with operating systems, too!
Exactly. A re-image solves almost everything.
Yup, the DevOps philosphy. Rebuilt to know good rather than trying to troubleshoot the unknown.
This is fun until it involves hardware. Ever try to downgrade a firmware on a NIC or SSD? For some vendors this is technically impossible without shipping it back....
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Same with a hard drive. In a lot of cases, having parts available is far more reliable, faster, and cheaper than a warranty from a vendor.
The quality of firmware and drivers on flash devices is a lot more all over the place than magnetic drives. Having 14 drives that implode under a burst of writes isn't that helpful.
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@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Commodity parts, get one that works and move on. Paying for unique support and code changes to support a single SMB use case rarely works. As Dustin points out, I can swap the part in an hour. I can't get support to understand what the issue is in that amount of time. Vendor support, in that example, represents high cost and high risk. I know that I can swap parts and that I can swap them now. I don't know if the vendor can fix the issue or if they will in any reasonable amount of time.
This only works if you keep non-matching spares. So For every LSI based controller you keep a similar Adaptec (and are ready to do a swing migration). For every Intel NIC have a QLogic, for every Intel Flash drive have a HGST one.
I watched (larger server OEM) techs replace a back plane twice and following that we got routed to the right team who got us a hotpatch for a SAS expander.
What's more fun with server OEM's is while the back end vendor may have identified the issue (say Broadcom), they run different code trains, and they may not check out that fix from the main OEM's trunk (for fear it causes other issues) until a customer reports an issue. Because of the hell of properly regression testing hardware this is how a lot of stuff works.
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@storageninja said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
@scottalanmiller said in The argument for official support vs third party support:
Commodity parts, get one that works and move on. Paying for unique support and code changes to support a single SMB use case rarely works. As Dustin points out, I can swap the part in an hour. I can't get support to understand what the issue is in that amount of time. Vendor support, in that example, represents high cost and high risk. I know that I can swap parts and that I can swap them now. I don't know if the vendor can fix the issue or if they will in any reasonable amount of time.
This only works if you keep non-matching spares. So For every LSI based controller you keep a similar Adaptec (and are ready to do a swing migration). For every Intel NIC have a QLogic, for every Intel Flash drive have a HGST one.
I watched (larger server OEM) techs replace a back plane twice and following that we got routed to the right team who got us a hotpatch for a SAS expander.
What's more fun with server OEM's is while the back end vendor may have identified the issue (say Broadcom), they run different code trains, and they may not check out that fix from the main OEM's trunk (for fear it causes other issues) until a customer reports an issue. Because of the hell of properly regression testing hardware this is how a lot of stuff works.
Same problem for the vendors. If you are dealing with unpatched spares, so are they. Having worked for some of the big ones, I know that their supply chains struggle to get parts, too. Heck, IBM couldn't deliver a server internally in more than six months, imagine how hard it is to get support parts!
