Among the CTO’s many responsibilities is a duty to keep operational costs down, and to ensure that infrastructure and systems are fully protected against failure.
Third party maintenance (TPM) contracts appear to meet both needs – they are often much cheaper than OEM coverage, and the engineers are typically of a similar standard.
When it comes to post-warranty hardware, the choice becomes even simpler. If an OEM will no longer support you hardware, a third party contract is the only choice.
But there is one major factor that is easily overlooked – spare parts provisioning.
Another question you must ask your TPM
Put simply, you must ask any prospective support partner about their spare part inventory, and the logistics behind delivering spares in the event of an emergency. Do they have parts for your systems, and can they get them delivered and fitted in an acceptable time frame?
Without immediate access to spare parts, the entire TPM support model collapses. Obviously TPM engineers can resolve technical issues, but in the event of a component failure, can they acquire and fit spares in a timely manner?
For the risk-averse CTO, a data loss our outage event caused by an inability to source spares would be simply unacceptable. The increase in time to repair (TTR) risks breaching internal SLAs – or even bringing their core infrastructure down.
There’s a second, equally important question to follow up with too – can you guarantee parts compatibility? Supplying incorrect, or sub-standard spares could compound problems – not least increasing the TTF while you wait for the correct part to be shipped.
To avoid these dangers, concerned CTOs replace EoSL hardware, renew their OEM support contract, and grudgingly re-enter the vendor’s upgrade cycle.
The CDS difference
Many years ago CDS realized that guaranteed access to viable spares was essential to delivering an all-round service for post-warranty storage systems. Our response was to build a multi-million dollar inventory that holds OEM-approved spares for every single system, owned by every single CDS client.
Before entering into an agreement, our engineers fully audit systems to ensure that we have the necessary parts in stock. We always try to secure parts for your storage systems, but if can’t, we don’t offer support. You always know what you are getting from CDS.
Our spare part inventory is held in locations across the globe, ensuring we can deliver and fit them anywhere in as little as four hours. Which means that we really can offer OEM-class support and maintenance in every respect.
Next steps
To learn more about CDS and our spare parts inventory and logistics, please get in touch.
– See more at: https://www.cds.net/blog/2017/05/one-question-you-must-ask-your-tpm-provider/#sthash.VLkXOcJb.dpuf