On 3 Feb 99, at 10:18, paul courry wrote:

> By cutting off support HP is trying to stimulate hardware sales,
> preferably shiny brand new hardware from HP.

I don't believe that this is the real reason, or that this is
anything more than a coincidence or happy consequence of a
decision reached for other reasons.  The "conspiracy" theory
that marketing and support work together to promote the sales
of new hardware depends on a degree of inter-divisional co-
operation that I have never observed in any large human
endeavour.

The sad fact for those of us that run older HP gear is that
there comes a time in the life cycle of every product where the
cost of maintaining the expertise and the spare parts needed
to provide service exceeds the revenue to be gained by
providing it.

While it is true that smaller organizations can and do continue
to provide the service on SOME hardware locally, HP's
position is somewhat different.  They have to do it world wide
and they have to be able to meet four hour response times.
This becomes problematic when your only spare part can be
half way around the globe and the only guy who knows how to
get it to work is either retired, moved on, or promoted out of a
field service position.

When HP ends the support life of a product, they are not
saying that it is junk, or that you have to buy something new.
What they are telling you is that if what you have fails then it
will normally take longer than a business is prepared to wait to
get it fixed.  You now have a choice, get someone else to
support it, replace it with something HP is prepared to
support, or go naked into the night.

In our case we have a number of older drives that we simply
inventory spares for.  The cost of a replacement drive for
inventory is often less than the cost of three or four month's
support for 4 hour response.  We have also configured our
volume sets so that we can reload the system or user data on
any three of the four drives in each set with sufficient unused
space left to operate normally.  This provides an extra cushion
of resiliency so that should the inventory drive prove faulty then
this will not be a fatal impediment to getting our system back
up in short order.

What are we really paying for this?  Well, besides the costs of
the inventory, we basically acknowledge that if we have a drive
failure then we do not expect to get the data off intact.  We
have accepted that an eight hour period (maximum) of
vulnerability will exist in our restore capability. Therefore our
backups are done with rigour and with great frequency.

In return we save a considerable amount of money in support
costs.  Our actual servicablity experience over the past five
years has been better than predicted and actually exceeds
that experienced during the preceding four years when we
were still on contract.  For us this approach has been a good
alternative.

We have experienced a few equipment failures, and on one
occasion we actually "forgot" about the four on three rule (so
infrequent are our problems) and had our  third party service
organization repair the drive for us (we do keep four hour
response service on our CPU and minimal core system).  A
post-mortem of this incident showed that had we followed our
written procedures then the out of pocket expense to the
company would have been some $500.00 less than it was and
we would have experienced an estimated two hours less
downtime.  As it was the cost was still far less than just five
months support on only one drive and the total system
downtime was still less than three hours.

This was our only major outage experienced in the past five
years.  As Murphy would have it,  this event occurred co-
incidentally with one of our recurring intermittent problems with
our DDS drives.  There was a very real fear that our backups
were faulty.  In the end this concern was moot as the drive
was brought back on line in situ. A later test demonstrated
that our backups were current to within four hours of the actual
outage and were readable.  However, during the incident this
concern did influence our decisions.

Regards,
Jim
---
James B. Byrne                Harte & Lyne Limited
vox: +1 905 561 1241          9 Brockley Drive
fax: +1 905 561 0757          Hamilton, Ontario
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