Why SGI is Hemorrhaging Customers...

[Armitage]

(at least at the low end)
I was just asked to weigh in on whether our office will renew our service agreements on some of our SGI systems.

The bill for a one year service agreement (includes all labor, parts, upgrades on some licenses) for a couple year old Octane (2x250MHz R10K CPU) came out to $4500!!!

I can easily double (or more) the performance of that machine for the kind of stuff we're interested in (primarily floating point) for about half the cost of one years service agreement! As a bonus, I can run down to BestBuy for replacement parts.

The machine was originally purchased for some of the graphics capabilities as well, but modern x86 systems can easily meet that requirement also.

Needless to say, I didn't reccomend the service agreement.

 

[gunf1ghter]

It really boils down to how mission critical the application is. Most fortune 5000 companies do have service level agreements on their most important systems, especially things like telecommunications and their database servers and mainframes.

Regardless of whether they can fix the thing themselves with off the shelf parts, it's worth the cost to have a company that can guarentee your uptime and also has engineers standing by to help you who are completely specialized in that server or application.

 

[Armitage]

Yea, I can see that on higher end machines (you don't even want to know what they charge for our O2K).
But for basically a workstation class machine, it's ridiculus.

 

[gunf1ghter]

No argument from me on that.

 

[Diable]

What if you leave the company for another job, get killed or the machine dies while your on vacation what will your company do for service then? Service agreements are insurance that there will always be someone to service that machine come hell or high water. So unless you can assure your company that you will always be on call to service that new x86 machine I think you should tell them to renew the service agreement with SGI.

 

[Armitage]

<< What if you leave the company for another job, get killed or the machine dies while your on vacation what will your company do for service then? Service agreements are insurance that there will always be someone to service that machine come hell or high water. So unless you can assure your company that you will always be on call to service that new x86 machine I think you should tell them to renew the service agreement with SGI. >>



Well, the only reason we need SGI for that sort of eventuality is because they are the only ones we can get parts for this machine from, and practically the only place you can get techs that understand the systems from.

If we go x86, our regular techs can do the hardware maintenance ... it would likely be cheaper to replace the whole x86 system then to pay ala-carte for any non-trivial SGI repair. And our sysadmin & technical staff has extensive experience with Unix/Linux systems, so we don't really need them for software problems either.

And again, there is the performance issue. A few years back I benchmarked one of my sims one an Octane almost identical to this one, and a 733 MHz dual PIII. The dual PIII was > 2x faster and 10x cheaper then the Octane. Now shove an AthlonMP or dual Xeon in there, and it's no contest. We primarily work with simulations & analysis tools that are extremely heavy on floating point, but don't tend to need the bandwidth & graphics that was/is SGI's strengths.

The bigger machines are a different story. The 8-way O2K and 3200 aren't getting replaced anytime soon, although our cluster is giving them a run for it also!

 

[MadRat]

Your management is asking for service agreements on existing hardware? C'mon, they highball you only to get your company to buy N-E-W.