Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server
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@MattSpeller said:
For SMB (emphasis on S I suppose) it makes a ton of sense and saves quite a bit of time to have them do the brain-dead basics for me. It's been a while since I did one but I recall it taking more than half a day between raw install, drivers & downloading / installing updates.
But if you don't create the need for time savings, you can save time and get the protection.
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Why the hell would he waste timeless bing how to script a server install he is going to do twice? The next time he installs a server it will be a different OS and he would have to take all the time to update the script for negligible benefit. There is also the poor here that as you need to know your hardware is configure right, you also need to know how to setup ye IS correctly manually before you can correctly write a script. That cuts into the savings even more.
You are completely missing the point on that Scott.
It has nothing to do with being bare metal or virtual. It ha to do with quantity.
I do happen to agree that you should always configure the bare metal yourself though. That is a different subject than scripting the server installs.
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@JaredBusch said:
Why the hell would he waste timeless bing how to script a server install he is going to do twice?
He shouldn't, but how is he getting the vendor to do this if he isn't providing that script (human instruction list) to them? If there is time to be saved, you can save it in either place.
And my scripting was definitely easy enough that it was worth it for two boxes. Any additional ones or rebuilds.... those are freebies.
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@JaredBusch said:
There is also the poor here that as you need to know your hardware is configure right, you also need to know how to setup ye IS correctly manually before you can correctly write a script. That cuts into the savings even more.
That's fine, but you need that before telling the vendor what to do, right? And you need to know that stuff for documentation, decision making, being prepared, etc.
My point here is not that everything should be scripted, I'm offering that as a way to fix issues that he seems to be having that he feels is making him have to have someone else do manual work that only takes a few minutes of manual effort (even updates take no human time, just lots of download time and mostly only if things like WSUS are not set up) but that having the vendor do these things is not reliably safe or effective. The scripting is ancillary.
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@JaredBusch said:
It has nothing to do with being bare metal or virtual. It ha to do with quantity.
It should not. If I'm doing an install of one server or a million, I still want virtualization for reliability and safety, portability, stability and speed of installs, changes, etc. And the more that I rely completely on a single piece of hardware, the more that I need to be concerned that the hardware and HV/OS are set up correctly, right? Because the smaller that your environment is, the bigger the impact of a problem like that.
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@JaredBusch said:
I do happen to agree that you should always configure the bare metal yourself though. That is a different subject than scripting the server installs.
Absolutely, completely different things. He was having additional issues that were leading him to feel he could not afford to do an install that, even as a one off, should be trivial effort. I was trying to fix that for what felt like a large scale problem.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't see why just because a company also sells hardware as well as services, they have to be a reseller.
Because that's what the word means. This is just basic English and has nothing to do with IT or the industry or vendor relationships. The word reseller is simply the term for someone who resells stuff.
O rly? I'll bow down before your greater knowledge of "basic English" then. Pretty much all companies are resellers then because most service providers (I guess NTG is the exception to the rule) will at some point sell some kind of product to go with their services. My company doesn't call itself a reseller but we sell a small amount of ducting to go with the heaters we manufacture and install.
Anyway, let me clear then, I outsource some of my IT work to my reseller. I assume you are ok with this?
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This has generated a lot of replies which has been interesting to read.
@Carnival-Boy - Let me explain a conversation between you and a reseller versus a consultancy company.
CB: Hi I'm looking to buy a new server
Reseller: Well we'd recommend the Dell FI"(SJK, fantastic performance, brilliant features.
CB: Hmm, well, I was thinking of something from HP?
Reseller: Oh no no no, you don't want HP, Dell is the best because reasons.
CB: Will it do everything I need?
Reseller: Certainly!CB: Hi, I'm looking to buy a new server
Consultant: Great, what do you need it for?
CB: File storage, email, active directory
Consultant: Ok let's talk about that and then we'll find you the right solution.Now this is a bit blunt, but this is how the conversation plays out most of the time. The key factor to look at with a consultant is, are they offering to "supply" you the server, or are they researching and helping you choose from another supplier?
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And you do have a fair bit of choice in the UK for non resellers, we're a minority bunch but we are out there. It's just so much easier to make a margin on desktops, servers, switches, anything really that many businesses set themselves up around that idea as a profit centre.
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@Breffni-Potter, OK, but according to @scottalanmiller the consultant is also a reseller if he sells the server as well the service. What do you do? Do you sell any product?
Let me explain the actual conversation between me and the "reseller"
CB: Hi I want a Proliant DL380, 1TB storage in RAID10. Give me a few options regarding disk size and type, processor etc and I'll pick the bundle I want. I need the server racking up, the RAID array configuring and ESXi 5.5 installing. Please quote for supply of server plus engineering time for the install.
Reseller: OK, here you go.
CB: OK, I've a few technical queries and I'm not quite sure which SAS Expander Card I need as the HP Quickspecs aren't too clear.
Reseller: OK, I've forwarded those queries to HP and this is what they've come back with.
CB: OK, here's the order.The reseller has no idea what I need this server for. The reseller does sell Dell, but I've been buying HP exclusively for about 15 years now, so I'm not going to consider anything else.
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I generally prefer to get the services and the hardware from the same place because otherwise if you get the service company on-site and it transpires that the hardware is faulty you could end-up paying twice to get the service company back in after replacement hardware has arrived. I like to know that whatever goes wrong there is only one company to blame and one company involved in fixing it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Breffni-Potter, OK, but according to @scottalanmiller the consultant is also a reseller if he sells the server as well the service. What do you do? Do you sell any product?
We'll help you research and choose the product, and give you a list of vendors who are good vendors Or we will have the conversation when ordering from a vendor, we'll act as your agent, the vendor invoices you directly.
Do you want us to be your supplier so you have one company to deal with? Yes we can do that but it's not free when purchasing product, it's a service you pay for.
@Carnival-Boy said:
I like to know that whatever goes wrong there is only one company to blame and one company involved in fixing it.
Yes...But that is also a problem. Lumping all your eggs in one basket. Might be better for another topic.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
It's just so much easier to make a margin on desktops, servers, switches, anything really that many businesses set themselves up around that idea as a profit centre.
Really? I'm surprised. I didn't think there was much margin at all on hardware these days. I buy most of my hardware from Softcat or Misco and my IT services guy often claims that I'm getting stuff at a lower price than he can buy trade (though I'll accept that he may be bullshitting me :))
Having said that, I once got a quote for HP workstations from my Autodesk guy and the prices were obscene, so I guess he may have customers out there who are happy to buy at his enormous mark-up.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Really? I'm surprised. I didn't think there was much margin at all on hardware these days.
Having said that, I once got a quote for HP workstations from my Autodesk guy and the prices were obscene, so I guess he may have customers out there who are happy to buy at his enormous mark-up.You've just answered your own question
- For a brand new office with 20x desktops and a server, you could easily make £1000 just on reseller margins alone.If you don't understand what the price of something should be, you would normally trust your reseller to look after you. I've just had a stack of quotes from different suppliers for something and for a generic Cisco box, they added £100 to the sale price, when Misco and all the others are £100 cheaper.
I've seen quotes that are £400-800 higher compared with the price listed on their website for the exact same product and spec. Because they can get away with it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
O rly? I'll bow down before your greater knowledge of "basic English" then. Pretty much all companies are resellers then because most service providers (I guess NTG is the exception to the rule) will at some point sell some kind of product to go with their services.
Absolutely, most are resellers. There is no secret here. That's why NTG calls itself a non-reseller MSP because being a reseller is so common that the majority of customers simply assume that everyone is one. Reselling has the highest margins, far higher than services, and if it can be lumped with services you get to earn from both.
I know you are trying to be snarky, but I'm not sure how else to explain it. Resellers resell things. If you drive a car, you are a driver. If you teach you are a teacher. It's just the word that is the name for someone who resells things.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Anyway, let me clear then, I outsource some of my IT work to my reseller. I assume you are ok with this?
Depends what it is. It's generally not a good place to start as any IT of value has decision making tied to it unless you are outsourcing only the most incredibly basic IT tasks that are overseen by others for all decision making. Resellers are called VARs (Value Added Resellers) when they add expertise alongside reselling. But the business model that makes sense for VARs is to use that "expertise" to mostly drive up sales. Not always, but much of the time, so you have to be very, very cautious about how you use them and monitor if they are in a position to be pushing sales higher through setup or recommendations.
VARs should always been carefully overseen by non-resellers (whether that is internal IT or outsourced IT) to isolate what they do to just things that are specific to what they resell or to specific non-decision roles (like script based helpdesk.)
Benchwork (rack and stack, parts replacement, cable cleanup, cabling, etc.) is obviously okay to outsource to anyone.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Breffni-Potter, OK, but according to @scottalanmiller the consultant is also a reseller if he sells the server as well the service. What do you do? Do you sell any product?
Let me explain the actual conversation between me and the "reseller"
CB: Hi I want a Proliant DL380, 1TB storage in RAID10. Give me a few options regarding disk size and type, processor etc and I'll pick the bundle I want. I need the server racking up, the RAID array configuring and ESXi 5.5 installing. Please quote for supply of server plus engineering time for the install.
Reseller: OK, here you go.
CB: OK, I've a few technical queries and I'm not quite sure which SAS Expander Card I need as the HP Quickspecs aren't too clear.
Reseller: OK, I've forwarded those queries to HP and this is what they've come back with.
CB: OK, here's the order.The reseller has no idea what I need this server for. The reseller does sell Dell, but I've been buying HP exclusively for about 15 years now, so I'm not going to consider anything else.
And there is nothing wrong with that. Resellers are a critical, necessary part of the ecosystem. Any non-reseller partners of yours (MSP, IT Outsourcer, whatever term applies or you want to use) should be using resellers / VARs for certain parts like you are mentioning. You should be able to tell a VAR exactly what you want to get and they should be willing to deliver it. In some cases, this can't happen because of agreements with their vendors, but mostly it does.
There are two factors to note here:
- On the front end in your example you have already done the legwork and are specifically isolating their advice to a small range of potential outcomes. This is you acting as IT (which you are) to regulate that the salesperson can't really try to sell other things. This is good, but it has to exist. If you lack the "you" layer of IT here, you need a non-reseller to provide this layer or to hire one or whatever.
- This is purely a reseller interaction. This thread was talking about IT work being done by a vendor and, legitimately, this mostly extends to a VAR too, but not to quite the same degree. But the interaction you are demonstrating here is not the same as who is doing the IT setup of the gear. VARs are specifically good for supplying the right parts. Even non-reseller MSPs or whatever need VARs to do that portion for them most of the time.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I generally prefer to get the services and the hardware from the same place because otherwise if you get the service company on-site and it transpires that the hardware is faulty you could end-up paying twice to get the service company back in after replacement hardware has arrived.
How does this happen? I mean that as a legitimate question as I'm not seeing where you could normally be charged twice.
If you have a warranty, why would you have to pay to get the equipment fixed?
If you don't have a warranty, why would the reseller be brought in to do the repair instead of having the services company do it?
In either situation, with or without warranty, I don't see how you would be charged twice.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I like to know that whatever goes wrong there is only one company to blame and one company involved in fixing it.
I don't know if this term extends to the UK but we call this "one throat to choke" in the US.
There is a lot of value here, for sure. But there are alternative ways to get this too. Your service company can front the reseller / VAR and deal with the "blame" on the backend rather than on the front. Then, not only are you dealing with just one throat to choke, but you get vendor management in with the bundle and often you get scale that you lose going on your own.
NTG does this with companies like SoftMart and xByte. You can come to us and want a Dell server. We are a Dell partner but not a reseller. We work with xByte. We have a strong relationship there and both NTG and xByte have a lot of reasons to want that relationship to go well and to keep communication channels wide open. We do the IT layer decision making and recommendations, we talk to xByte and get their deep channel expertise. The two are separate but have a lot of leverage. NTG can also interface directly with Dell for their expertise, but xByte knows we aren't going to undercut them as we never do hardware sales. It requires trust to make it work, obviously we could turn into a Dell reseller overnight if we wanted. Because NTG works with xByte all the time, we are more likely to get aggressive pricing and better support from them both because we are a high profile customer representative and also because we have really good, ongoing communications and support channels with them.
Same with SoftMart. If a customer is doing purchasing through SM but works with NTG, they hop onto the NTG buying group to get into bulk rate prices (making NTG a top ten volume customer of a very large reseller.) This lets everyone in the entire group benefit from the volume - driving prices down for everyone. And because of the volume and continuous transactions (and internal management of overhead conversations) NTG gets faster responses, lower prices and better service than standard customers which gets passed on to the whole group. We can get non-warranty parts in two hours for a lot of gear!! We can get machines replaced faster than the primary vendors can get a person out to a customer location in many markets.
So I totally understand your goal here and think that it is quite often very good. But if you think of the support structure in layers (I need to make a diagram for this) there is always one throat to choke, the question is whether it is internal IT, external IT or handled by not having a selection of vendors and relying on only one.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
It's just so much easier to make a margin on desktops, servers, switches, anything really that many businesses set themselves up around that idea as a profit centre.
Really? I'm surprised. I didn't think there was much margin at all on hardware these days.
Depends. Desktops, laptops someone might make $20 but when you are talking about 100 machines, it adds up. Especially as it is often recurring (every few years.) Servers, expect to make a few hundred dollars per sale for SMB scale servers. There is profit in the OS and hypervisor sales too. It's not just the hardware but the warranties, software, etc.
But the really big money is in other things like storage and other appliances where profits can be in the tens of thousands per sale!! That's why resellers are so often willing to throw customers away on the chance that they can make a storage sale that isn't necessary.
Switches and networking gear has margin. Very little if you sell Netgear, a bit if you sell Cisco.
