Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@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.
I buy the server from Company A but the installation service from Company B. Company B estimate 4 hours work so quote $400. The server arrives and Company B start the project. They find that the server is either broken or is missing crucial parts. HP agree to send new parts but it will take 24 hours. Company B has to abandon the project and return the following day (if they're available!). So a 4 hour job now takes 8 hours with travel etc etc. How much do Company B now charge?
I'm confused. The thing that I don't understand is why you have a Company B doing "IT engineering" work as part of "installation services." I don't understand how the issue arises here. Again, I think this is a difference in terms. I think you are using "installation" to mean both the racking and stacking non-technical bench work AND the subsequent IT engineering work. What I'm questioning is why you have those two functions lumped together. That Company A does the "installation" of physically installing the box into the rack and plugging it in makes perfect sense and should be super cheap as they don't even need someone who knows what a computer is to do that work. Hopefully they know how to plug in the ILO or DRAC and put in your address for it. But that's it. Done. The bench work is complete.
Then that company tells you (or Company B) that the racking is done and the machines are accessible. Now the IT people at company B, the skilled people who are party of your IT planning and oversight, setup the server.
If done this way, you get the separation of duties to save money and get focused skills, you get the HP reseller handling any HP issues, you get your IT support without a break in the chain, etc.
I'm not sure what's happening that you are feeling stuck having the OS installation done at the moment of physical server delivery.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Surely instead:
Company A ships the server to Company B.
Company B does a health check and confirms it is good.
No one in their right mind commits to installing an untested brand new server on a project. Even if company A do everything, if you schedule a week-end of downtime, they turn up with the never turned on HP server, and it still takes 24 hours to get replacements from HP, then the project is at risk. Especially with a time sensitive migration, with no downtime projects it's less of an issue but even so.
Exactly. And this is how it works in enterprise IT departments too. Yes, each of these roles is internal instead of external, but the processes remain the same.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I buy the server from Company A but the installation service from Company B. Company B estimate 4 hours work so quote $400. The server arrives and Company B start the project.
So if you use all company A, how does this change? If you buy a server through Company A and you order four hours of IT work from them and the server that you get is not ready when you have scheduled them to come out and work sure, they might decide to give you a break because they are handling all of the parts, but in reality there is not really any difference here, for the most part, between them needing to be paid and Company B needing to be paid. Even if you are getting the work totally from Company A they still have to schedule the people and pay them even if the parts are bad. That's why, whether you use all company A, a mix of company A & B or all internal departments we don't schedule next steps until previous steps are done. There is lots of risk and wasted money from big, or even little, unknowns and surprises.
Now when you buy everything from one vendor, you can put more pressure on them, but you are just lowering the margins and making them less likely to want to work with you or you will encourage them to pad more if you aggressively schedule them to do IT work for which the equipment has not been tested yet. Hopefully they would warn you not to have the resources from the IT side all lined up and billing by the hour before the bench work was validated.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
Surely instead:
Company A ships the server to Company B.
Company B does a health check and confirms it is good.
No one in their right mind commits to installing an untested brand new server on a project. Even if company A do everything, if you schedule a week-end of downtime, they turn up with the never turned on HP server, and it still takes 24 hours to get replacements from HP, then the project is at risk. Especially with a time sensitive migration, with no downtime projects it's less of an issue but even so.
There is no week-end downtime whilst this is going on. The server arrives, it is put together and racked up and then the RAID is configured and the hypervisor is installed. It will then sit there for some time before I eventually start installing or migrating VMs on to prior to it going in to production.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Again, I think this is a difference in terms. I think you are using "installation" to mean both the racking and stacking non-technical bench work AND the subsequent IT engineering work. What I'm questioning is why you have those two functions lumped together.
Yes, I am lumping them together. It's all labour costs to me and I don't distinguish between the two.
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@Breffni-Potter As an example of what @scottalanmiller is recommending, I'd be interested to know what you would charge and if it would save me money. So I'll give you the basics of my last Proliant order.
I paid £750 for the setup of the server, RAID10 and ESXi install. That is their day rate. It took them quite a bit less than that in the end, but it was fixed price job and I'm more or less happy with what I paid.
The alternative would be to buy the Proliant from Misco and get Misco to do the installation and racking and then get you in later to do the RAID and the ESXi. I don't know how long that would take you, an hour maybe? If you're in London, that's around a 140 mile trip to my place on top. I don't know how much Misco charge for benchwork. Do you? What is the norm for benchwork in the UK?
I'd be interested in any ballpark figures you might like to share
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Do you think that makes a difference?
Yes I think project based vs Time and Material makes a huge difference.
Just ask Hubtech. He bid a job as a project - expected that project to take 150 hours, he's north of 200 hours now, but isn't making any more money because it was a project bid.
So if you got a project bid that locked in a specific price for a specific outcome, then your price shouldn't change regardless of how long it takes them to accomplish it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I buy the server from Company A but the installation service from Company B. Company B estimate 4 hours work so quote $400. The server arrives and Company B start the project.
So if you use all company A, how does this change? If you buy a server through Company A and you order four hours of IT work from them and the server that you get is not ready when you have scheduled them to come out and work sure, they might decide to give you a break because they are handling all of the parts, but in reality there is not really any difference here, for the most part, between them needing to be paid and Company B needing to be paid. Even if you are getting the work totally from Company A they still have to schedule the people and pay them even if the parts are bad. That's why, whether you use all company A, a mix of company A & B or all internal departments we don't schedule next steps until previous steps are done. There is lots of risk and wasted money from big, or even little, unknowns and surprises.
Now when you buy everything from one vendor, you can put more pressure on them, but you are just lowering the margins and making them less likely to want to work with you or you will encourage them to pad more if you aggressively schedule them to do IT work for which the equipment has not been tested yet. Hopefully they would warn you not to have the resources from the IT side all lined up and billing by the hour before the bench work was validated.
Interesting - I've personally never seen this approach before - it does make sense, I've just never seen it.
As an SMB consultant I did it all - the so called bench work (installing the components into the chassis and racking it), and the RAID/OS/etc IT work.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I paid £750 for the setup of the server, RAID10 and ESXi install. That is their day rate. It took them quite a bit less than that in the end, but it was fixed price job and I'm more or less happy with what I paid.
I'm curious, if he ran into problems that made this take a full day and one hour on the second day, would you be charged for two full days? Or only for one day? Again I'd say it depends on if you are being charged time and materials vs project.
From here it appears that you're being changed time and materials with a minimum charge of one day for a service like this - which you indicated took significantly less than one business day to complete (because there were no issues).
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@Carnival-Boy - First I must unleash the legal disclaimer.
"The following statement does not constitute a quotation or guarantee or offer of goods and services"
Why won't the server come from Misco to my office? Then I build the raid? Do the config? setup remote access tools, then stick it on a courier to you.
Alternatively, I stick it on a courier, then get an engineer who just does bench work over to you, he un-boxes the server, sticks it in the rack, makes it look good, then he walks off.
I then remote in and fix any tweaks or snags.
I am much more expensive than a bog standard racking engineer, so why would you pay my rate to take something out of a box? More importantly why are the supplier doing the config work on site for you? They should do it at their bench.
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1 hour on site for racking work at your office, £100 as a ballpark.
Actual IT work, DOA testing, Raid config, ESXI setup done on a bench in the corner. £300 ish.
So the extra £350 you currently pay, what do you get with that?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Again, I think this is a difference in terms. I think you are using "installation" to mean both the racking and stacking non-technical bench work AND the subsequent IT engineering work. What I'm questioning is why you have those two functions lumped together.
Yes, I am lumping them together. It's all labour costs to me and I don't distinguish between the two.
That's a problem as you are the IT coordinator here, if you are not differentiating between the different types of work that you oversee to ensure that the right people are doing it at the right times, who is? If you had an MSP who oversaw all of these moving parts, you could have them do the differentiation for you. But seeing all labor as one thing is a big problem. You have two completely different labour groups here, one IT and one bench. What if there was cabling to be run, would you lump unionized (in the US) electrician labour in too?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
Surely instead:
Company A ships the server to Company B.
Company B does a health check and confirms it is good.
No one in their right mind commits to installing an untested brand new server on a project. Even if company A do everything, if you schedule a week-end of downtime, they turn up with the never turned on HP server, and it still takes 24 hours to get replacements from HP, then the project is at risk. Especially with a time sensitive migration, with no downtime projects it's less of an issue but even so.
There is no week-end downtime whilst this is going on. The server arrives, it is put together and racked up and then the RAID is configured and the hypervisor is installed. It will then sit there for some time before I eventually start installing or migrating VMs on to prior to it going in to production.
That the server has to sit there for some time (hours, days whatever) makes it even easier to not need to have the bench people from the reseller do your IT engineering work. The only argument that I would see for moving the IT work to the bench people here would be because the time frame to get set up is so tight that there isn't time for a handoff - which would make me think you would not want to hand it off to bench people either but to do it yourself to reduce the double checking needed.
But as there is time for a proper handover to the right people, seems like waiting for the right people would be good.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
The alternative would be to buy the Proliant from Misco and get Misco to do the installation and racking and then get you in later to do the RAID and the ESXi. I don't know how long that would take you, an hour maybe? If you're in London, that's around a 140 mile trip to my place on top. I don't know how much Misco charge for benchwork. Do you? What is the norm for benchwork in the UK?
That's the great thing - once you separate the bench work (rack, stack and plumb) there is no travel! All of the IT portion of the work should be done remotely, not on site. Bench work is the only type of work that requires people to be on site (unless customers just like to talk to people or whatever.) But technically, only bench work or "fixing broken networking" requires IT to ever be physically present.
This is why enterprise shops don't have the IT staff ever interacting with servers. When you get big enough this isn't a theoretical split but a physical one. I've never seen a company with over a thousand people (in the last sixteen years) that had their servers where IT could even easily go look at them. Often they are in other states or countries. Many even larger places I have been actually ban IT from getting access as the security to do the IT work and the security to touch the devices was to be split.
So by limiting the bench work to the bench work people should mean lower cost and faster service on that end combined with faster response, lower cost and more reliable oversight on the IT side.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm curious, if he ran into problems that made this take a full day and one hour on the second day, would you be charged for two full days? Or only for one day? Again I'd say it depends on if you are being charged time and materials vs project.
Lemme try and answer all your points here. The answer is, it depends. If it's an act of God, I'd likely pay. If it's a problem they have caused, for example their salesman hasn't ordered the right parts, or even that the parts are faulty, then I wouldn't pay - even if it took 2 or 3 days. So we generally come to an agreement depending on the cause. Both parties try and be reasonable. We're both about the long term relationship so we don't squabble much about a few hundred bucks here and there.
So the problem is, if I ordered the kit from another company and there was a problem with it, it is much harder for me to ask them to come back another day and not charge me. So that's why I'd prefer to get the kit from them, providing it doesn't put me out to much, as it just seems a reasonable and fair thing to do. I don't always do it because they can't always get a good price, but I try and do it.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
1 hour on site for racking work at your office, £100 as a ballpark.
Actual IT work, DOA testing, Raid config, ESXI setup done on a bench in the corner. £300 ish.
So the extra £350 you currently pay, what do you get with that?
Nothing. Are you sending an engineer from London or do you have someone local? £100 seems very cheap. That's likely to be a 3 or 4 hour job when you include travel time isn't it?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I buy the server from Company A but the installation service from Company B. Company B estimate 4 hours work so quote $400. The server arrives and Company B start the project.
So if you use all company A, how does this change? If you buy a server through Company A and you order four hours of IT work from them and the server that you get is not ready when you have scheduled them to come out and work sure, they might decide to give you a break because they are handling all of the parts, but in reality there is not really any difference here, for the most part, between them needing to be paid and Company B needing to be paid. Even if you are getting the work totally from Company A they still have to schedule the people and pay them even if the parts are bad. That's why, whether you use all company A, a mix of company A & B or all internal departments we don't schedule next steps until previous steps are done. There is lots of risk and wasted money from big, or even little, unknowns and surprises.
Now when you buy everything from one vendor, you can put more pressure on them, but you are just lowering the margins and making them less likely to want to work with you or you will encourage them to pad more if you aggressively schedule them to do IT work for which the equipment has not been tested yet. Hopefully they would warn you not to have the resources from the IT side all lined up and billing by the hour before the bench work was validated.
Interesting - I've personally never seen this approach before - it does make sense, I've just never seen it.
As an SMB consultant I did it all - the so called bench work (installing the components into the chassis and racking it), and the RAID/OS/etc IT work.
Better for IT to do the bench work than for the bench people to do the IT work. In theory the bench work is minimal in scope (few hours here and there) whereas the IT work is probably larger in scope (maybe a few hours up front but is part of your ongoing oversight and control.)
Larger firms, like NTG, have bench staff in some locations and what most do is they use a "remote hands" service to have bench people anywhere. Bench people are cheap and easy to get. And they don't need deep insight into the business, they are stateless. They are almost exclusively advanced manual labour. So having IT people do this just is a little expensive per hour, but having bench people do IT work is risky as critical IT decisions are being made by the people not trained for that or not employed by you in that role.
In the OP's case, it could be either. He's paying IT rates for bench work, for sure. The installation is quite expensive. But they are not part of his IT team, so the approach is treating them like bench (not letting them be part of the ongoing IT operations and making them part of the decision making process.)
This is one of the ways where one man shops suffer because they can't have bench staff as part of their team they are stuck throwing their high price resources at manual labour (I've done it before) and you wind up either not earning what you are worth or having to charge too much and in many cases wind up not being great at bench work because it isn't something that you do often. I'm terrible at racking servers, for example, because I do it so rarely. A full time racker can rack a server reliably, the right way in minutes. Me, might take me an hour longer and I might break something in the process. All while costing too much.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
More importantly why are the supplier doing the config work on site for you? They should do it at their bench.
They generally have done in the past, but they didn't for this last job. I don't know why. They asked if I was ok with them doing it here and I was. I don't particularly mind either way. I quite like to keep an eye on them when they're but doing it off-site is also fine.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Nothing. Are you sending an engineer from London or do you have someone local? £100 seems very cheap. That's likely to be a 3 or 4 hour job when you include travel time isn't it?
RAID and VMware setup should be round about an hour total, no travel needed. RAID setup is five minutes unless a discussion has to happen about it. VMware install is normally under ten minutes. You need to check things, get access, etc. So no realistic way to be under an hour. But the actual work to be done is a few minutes.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Breffni-Potter said:
More importantly why are the supplier doing the config work on site for you? They should do it at their bench.
They generally have done in the past, but they didn't for this last job. I don't know why. They asked if I was ok with them doing it here and I was. I don't particularly mind either way. I quite like to keep an eye on them when they're but doing it off-site is also fine.
If they are already there, I'd say that is six of one, half dozen of the other. Fine either way.
Only reason that I an adamant about doing the setup remotely is that it immediately tests the out of band management and other external access mechanisms from the moment go and doesn't allow for those things to be missed which, I've found, is a big gap in a lot of scenarios and very worth checking.
I like to have my remote hands people call the IT staff and have remote access tested and checked off before the bench guy walks away.
