Dell Server Support Beyond 5 Years (UK)

[barrycork]

A couple of our Dell servers are approaching 5 years old. Dell will not continue to provide hardware support to a server beyond that age. As they are business critical I must have hardware support cover.

Can anyone suggest a third party company that may offer support to Dell equipment beyond 5 years in age within the UK?

The alternative is obviously to puchase new servers however this a cost I would rather avoid.

Regards,

Barry

 

[jkupski]

The alternative is obviously to puchase new servers however this a cost I would rather avoid.

At >5 years, it's very possible that the support contract cost will be a significant percentage of new hardware cost. At three years, some of my gear had warranty renewal costs approaching 50% of replacement price.

Obviously, this doesn't take into account the expenses you will incur (building out the new servers, downtime while you swap them out, troubleshooting when your application doesn't run on an up to date version of the OS, but the old OS doesn't support your new hardware, etc.) but it's definitely worth at least comparing the costs before you proceed.

 

[NickFerrar]

Yeah we've always done a cost comparison between a new server with 3 years support included vs buying 3 years maintenance and the new server has always been cheaper or very close so it's been a no brainer for us and we've never used a 3rd party for support. Granted though if your server is running some weird legacy app that would be a nightmare to relocate it's probably not so simple!

 

[AndrewTait]

Sorry Barry, I have only just seen your post.

I have used a company called IKON (

http://www.ikon.co.uk)for

Dell Support in the past. They have been very helpful when we had a failure, and even had an engineer on site until gone 12am Friday night/Saturday morning once, even though our contract did not cover us for that.

We then changed to a company called yanex (

http://www.yanex.com),

but have never had to use them in anger.

He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy (Monty Python's The Life of Brian)