Posted on Friday, July 22, 2016 in Data Center, Big Data
Often the most challenging aspect of IT roles are those factors which have nothing to do with technology at all. Every hour spent on administrative tasks is an hour lost that could otherwise be invested in working on delivering technical projects or defining strategies that will help drive the business forward.
The move towards best-of-breed environments means that many enterprises are operating data centers populated with storage equipment from a range of vendors. Obviously this approach allows them to build a hugely flexible IT infrastructure and contain costs. There is one major drawback however – the number of maintenance and support contracts that need to be negotiated and managed increases exponentially.
And every increase in bureaucracy increases secondary running costs simply by consuming time and resources that could otherwise be used towards improving IT operations.
Vendor agnostic support reduces bureaucracy
In order to maximize ROI from a vendor agnostic environment, it makes good business sense to minimize bureaucracy. And the best way to achieve this much needed streamlining is through the consolidation of support contracts.
In almost every case, established OEMs will not offer support for equipment supplied by another vendor. Which means the only choice is to partner with a vendor agnostic third party maintenance provider who can support all of your equipment.
Here at CDS, we offer complete support for a wide range of storage products from all of the major OEMs, including EMC, NetApp, HDS and IBM. Our support and maintenance offerings protect both pre- and post-warranty equipment, allowing you to extract even greater value from your assets.
Our contracts are also fully customizable, allowing you to choose the response levels and coverage that best meets your needs on a unit by unit basis. Which means you can replace your existing mix of contracts with one definitive agreement. Suddenly managing agreements becomes a whole lot less time-consuming and costly.
Choosing a single maintenance provider will also reduce many of the headaches when you do encounter an infrastructure problem. In a mixed environment OEMs will often point the blame at each other for a service issue – which is distinctly unhelpful when you need to get systems back online.
Choosing a single maintenance provider means there is no buck-passing – they own the issue because they support all of your equipment. From the disk arrays to the computers and networking gear, everything can be treated (and fixed) as a single unit by a vendor agnostic engineer.
For more details about how we can help reduce bureaucracy and deliver even greater savings on your IT infrastructure (as well as contract rates 40 per cent to 70 per cent less than your current agreements), please get in touch.
– See more at: http://www.cds.net/blog/2016/07/contract-bureaucracy/#sthash.QjvSJvSr.dpuf