Archives of the TeradataForum

Message Posted: Thu, 04 Oct 2001 @ 20:47:07 GMT

	<Prev	Next>		<<First	<Prev	Next>	Last>>

Hi all-

Easy now, everyone, this is a somewhat hot issue whenever you provide tech support for a product, just how far can you reasonably go being that you are not there on site? And I think you are both pointing out good arguments in your mails, and I'm not trying to keep the peace here, but I do think there are some things that are not out in the open here and yet.

I have friends that do support for a large computer company here in the US, they provide worldwide tech support for the communications parts of the OS and platform. They have a lot of frustrations with users that are not technically inclined enough to manage the systems they have been assigned to manage. This happens often enough because of shortages in staff and just a pure lack of qualified people out there. The fault does not lie with the vendor here, it lies with those who have not been able to provide internal support for their system (read: management, not the poor guy calling for support). The vendor my friends work for will provide the support that the initial poster here is looking for, but they will take his machine to their data center, set it up as they see fit, and more or less babysit the asset for you while you are allowed to use it. This support costs more than a qualified sys admin will cost you in four or five years, but on some cases, it is worth it to have the headaches and overhead of infrastructure off your hands.

I am imagining that the starter of this thread is probably not a big unix person, and that his primary interest is not in managing and tweaking his unix systems, am I right?

I also imagine that the gentleman who responded has dealt with this before and is not over-excited to see this again.

Well, our site has a large number of unix boxen that are MP-RAS, and that is my job, admin them, someone else does the database adminning, and I can tell you, it is a full time job and then some. Sys admin-ing requires you to work around the active times on the database and to schedule your outages so that they are the shortest to allow for a 24 hour availability as much as possible. If it was my job to handle both sys and database admin, I don't think either would get done efficiently nor would I be happy to do either. I can understand the first poster's frustration and I also see the second poster's reasoning.

In conclusion, the only options that the original poster has is to see if anyone will offer full, off-site admin support for his box (big money), or look for a qualified sys admin. (which may be more than the budget can handle). I have yet to meet the vendor that will look after your system to the extent expressed in the first post, unless you buy the off-site management deal, and I don't know that NCR offers that (HP does with their superdomes).

Good luck,

loadc

	<Prev	Next>		<<First	<Prev	Next>	Last>>