SUMMARY: SUN warranty period

This is a very thorny issue with many people on this list.  I received more
comments on this than I have on anything else I have ever posted.  Too many
people to list by name...

Information that would be of interest to everyone.

1) 3 Year warranty on SUN E250 and up servers.
2) Workstations are always 1 year unless...

3) You can purchase extended warranties at time of purchase (bronze or
whatever) or get it thrown in (unknown at what cost).  

4) Some large companies managed to negotiate 3 years into volume purchase
agreements but information is sketchy on this.

5) Part warranties for stuff like hard drives (3 years), memory (5 years).
I am not sure how accurate this information is since I believe companies
like Seagate force OEM warranties over there longer standard warranty terms.
You will never find SUN/Seagate model numbers on Seagate websites.  If you
purchase Kingston RAM you get lifetime warranty but let's not get into that.

6) IBM AIX and HP-UX workstations are one year.

In a nutshell, SUN is only doing the minimum as far as workstation warranty.
The only maverick was Alpha and better warranties did not help them.  I
suspect Compaq improved the Alpha warranty period to help their sales. 

Just to put my site's hardware costs into perspective.

We have 5 Alpha workstations which needed the following :

- 1 main board, 2 power supplies and 3 hard drives.  All covered by
warranty.  

100+ Compaq computers at this site.  
- Various failures (hard drives, power supplies).  No part cost, all covered
by warranty.  Compaq has shipped parts same or next day.  This is same type
of coverage as SUN for 1st year.

10+ IBM AIX workstations.  

- no good data since we have not purchased any IBM's for over 3 years.

20+ Sun workstations.  

- 1 Elite3D card failure. No cost, 1st year problem
- 4 U10 CPU failures. No cost, 1st year problem
- 2 hard drive failure. No cost, 1st year problem
- 1 Blade 1000 power supply failure.  After first year, 2 day downtime and
cost of part.

For the number of SUN's we have, the hardware problems have been a little
scary.  Alpha's are worse but SUN does not look good versus cheapo Compaq
PC's.  I agree 100% that SUN servers are more reliable than their
workstations but SUN needs to complete against the likes of Compaq PC not
IBM AIX or HP-UX workstations.  We do not trade-in or replace Compaq's after
2 years so those cheap PC's are fairly reliable.  We just move our old
Compaq's to low CPU demand people.  We have many 400Mhz Intels on people's
desktop.  

The cost of the Blade 1000 power supply was more than a new Blade 100.

All I want from SUN is 3 years no cost part replacement service.  Just ship
me the part within a reasonable time period, 1-3 days, and don't charge me.


Marcelino

 


-----Original Message-----
From: Marcelino Mata 
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 10:34 AM
To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
Subject: SUN warranty period



  When we purchase a Compaq/HP PC, it comes with 3 year parts replacement
warranty.  I think this is standard terms for companies like Gateway, Dell
etc.  When I purchase a SUN workstation, it only has 1 year parts
replacement warranty.  I think SUN's warranty is standard for UNIX vendors.
Can anyone confirm if IBM AIX or HP-UX boxes come with 1yr or 3yr warranty?
I know that Compaq extended the Alpha/Tru64 warranty period to 3 years when
the bought out DEC.  

I am hoping someone can explain the rational for the warranty period for
UNIX vs PC manufacturers or give me an argument I can use with my
management.  From their point of view, they pay $3,000 for a Compaq box with
3 year warranty and $9,000 for UNIX workstation with 1 yr warranty.  With
just about every UNIX application being well supported under Windows 2000,
it's becoming very hard to justify UNIX workstations.  The additional need
for hardware support for UNIX workstations is just making it that much
harder.  

Marcelino
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