Just got a quote from Dell for warranty renewal...wow.

Er, no. Just no.

[And I am firmly of the opinion that extended warranties are a racket. If "the house" didn't almost always win, they wouldn't be marketing them in the first place. The cost is just not worth it in 99.9999% of cases and I'll gladly roll the dice that I'm not going to be in the remaining 0.0001%.]
 
In ServerLandia those fall into the "Industrial Revolution" time frame. Not the Middle Ages but certainly not the Roaring 20's.

Generally I'm no fan of extended warranties. But when it comes to business LoB stuff, aka self-hosting, it's worth it. Even that is slowly falling by the wayside with the popularity of Azure, Google, etc, etc.
 
For servers, you are crazy not to have active warranties, IMO. The value of the downtime for (in this case) 35 employees while I would source a motherboard or RAID card or even a power supply would more than eclipse the cost of the warranty. Still, this is just stupid. I sent them an email back saying that amount would never be approved. They paid about $85K for all of that iron 3 years ago, but $20K for extending the coverage is too damn high, says I.

We'll see if they come back with a newly-discovered discount, haha - they had better if they want the business.
 
  • Haha
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HCHTech said:
For servers, you are crazy not to have active warranties, IMO. The value of the downtime for (in this case) 35 employees while I would source a motherboard or RAID card or even a power supply would more than eclipse the cost of the warranty.
Click to expand...
Yup...I don't want to support a business that...sorta has "uptime requirements"...without at least three things...
*Datto for server backup....Alto or Siris...of course Siris for larger setups, more than one server
*Vendor warranty maintained on the server
*Vendor support of the line of business software

For high SLA clients, that 4x hour hardware delivery...

Been in the hot seat a few times when there is a hardware issue...and all you see on the screen are codes...that the server vendors support department deciphers. Redundant power supply backplane or say, the RAID blows up....often there are certain steps to "force back online". I want the vendor support in my ear while doing that.

That price is high..you sure those are all < 3 years? Looks like a price for say, 4x servers that are on their 6th year or something..and the prior support "expired".
 
HCHTech said:
They paid about $85K for all of that iron 3 years ago
Click to expand...
Sounds to me like an auto generated warranty quote based on a percentage of the original purchase price. This generally works well for lower priced hardware but is absolutely ridiculous when you get into the higher priced stuff. Hopefully once you have a human take a look at it they'll give you a more reasonable quote.
 
sapphirescales said:
Sounds to me like an auto generated warranty quote based on a percentage of the original purchase price. This generally works well for lower priced hardware but is absolutely ridiculous when you get into the higher priced stuff. Hopefully once you have a human take a look at it they'll give you a more reasonable quote.
Click to expand...
It's more than that. Servers are often quoted 4 hr response times and so you are paying for Dell to have parts stored at UPS or FedEx wearhouses ready for rapid delivery.

The price quote is probably for that level of service.
 
That is a 14th generation Dell server, released in 2017. Effective end of service life is 2027 at first blush, but these units lack TPM and other critical hardware to support Server 2022 correctly. They don't support vSphere correctly either.

Dell doesn't want to support them going forward, and they show that with stupid high warranty costs. Replace the server! Or better yet, compress the workloads into appropriate cloud services.

You can't just magic a server together for a decade anymore, the market has changed, the threat landscape has changed, everything has changed. SMBs are going to die if they continue wasting money on hardware! Because the server gets bought with a 7 year warranty on it tops, and when the warranty dies you replace the unit. IF you didn't do a 7 year at purchase, you're doing it wrong! If you can only get a 5 year... well you're replacing in 5 years.
 
We renewed an R740xd last year after it's initial 5yrs came up. Extended for 1yr with ProSupport 4hr. It was a fraction over £2,000. So yeah your quote seems wild to me.

Do you have a breakdown of how much per server? Also is it ProSupport or Prosupport Plus? The latter is usually near double and I doubt you actually want or require it.

If they don't come down in price have a serious look a at purchasing another refurbished R740xd or even two. You might be surprised how cheap they are now. Get these setup like a hot-spare with your hypervisor installed, patched and ready to take on workloads if another server fails. Even better if you already have a cluster and shared storage setup.

The R940... I'd probably want to renew warranty either way. I'm guessing you have a boatload of storage in this.
 
I was out for a few days - unplanned trip for a funeral, unfortunately. These units were purchased from the Dell Outlet, as it happens, and we added the available TPM cards or chips - I don't remember the exact process from 10/21 when they were purchased, but I remember the result. They absolutely supported Server 2022, it was a month long process finalizing the purchase.

Since you made me look, here is the output of the TPM query in powershell from the 940:

1723234585750.png

2.0 it is.

And here it is from one of the 740xds:

1723234770116.png

Also 2.0.

We specifically bought the 14th gens because of the dollar savings (and that they would still support Server 2022). We bought way more server than they could have otherwise afforded this way - I'd do it again. The big one has 1.12TB of RAM, 2x 36-core Xeon Golds and 14TB of SSD usable storage. The smaller one has 256GB of RAM, 2 x 20-core Xeon Golds and 14TB of SSD usable storage. The 2 little ones are dedicated for backup - they have 128GB of RAM, 2 x 14-core Xeon Golds, 1TB of SSD storage for the OS and backup software, and 40TB of usable disk storage for backup data. One is onsite and it's duplicate is offsite.

Anyway, back to the support renewal - I will double-check the SLA from the quote, I didn't ask for 4hr, but they may have snuck that in there.
 
@HCHTech Yeah someone screwed up. That platform so equipped is fully ready to support Server 2025, much less Server 2022 and the warranty terms should be quite reasonable.

Sadly, I'm finding many that aren't so equipped... which really isn't fun.
 
Update - after refusing the initial offer (which I found out was next business day SLA not 4-hour, but was for 4 years, not the 3 we requested), we now have a new offer (with a 20% discount!) of $12K. This experience makes me not want to trust them at all. So I think I'll just try to extend the warranties online without a reps help so I can see what pricing is offered there. We've got until the end of September to work something out.
 
FYI, if you do a lot of warranty renewals, servers, laptops...check out Scalepad.
I think you go through PAX8 right? Yack with your rep on it.

Right now I'm working on a possible migration project for a client...from on prem server to all 365...and "most" of his accounting apps went up to their SaaS (Walters/CCH user). He is weighing that, versus...his server warranty expires this October...and having to renew it for another year.

HP Proliant server, 5 years old...the 5x year it came with is up in Oct. Renewal for just 1x year from HP would be around 4 grand, our price through Scalepad...about 1 grand. Gives us a bit of room to mark that up! :) Scalepad uses the same resources for hardware and onsite install that vendor warranty does.
 
and.....final update: After complaining one more time, we got their "final offer, good today only" quote of $10,300. Amazingly, that offer was still good 2 days later once I got the expense approved. :rolleyes: I'm not usually one to haggle, but it just goes to show what their margins must be on this stuff.

Oh, and I also did try to just renew online, that process only leads to an query for your contact information so a salesman can send you a quote.
 
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