Third-Party Maintenance

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Blog topics regarding third party IT maintenance.

New Year, New IT Budget—Spend Wisely

A new year means a new IT budget. You could spend time that you don’t have re-structuring your operations, tweaking your networks, cost-cutting infrastructure, and generally cutting corners—all for small percentage savings with no real guarantee. There’s lower-hanging fruit for cost-optimization. Rather than expend exorbitant time and effort, you could take more logical and efficient measures that don’t deplete your in-house resources and allow you to see more immediate results. Here's how to start the year off on the right foot and get some quick wins. Make Immediate Room in Your IT Budget Consider the following alternatives to how you currently leverage and maintain your virtual and physical infrastructure. Third-Party Maintenance OEM hardware support increases significantly in cost after EOL is announced. And this seeming monopoly often pressures you to [...]

New Year’s Resolution: Consolidate Vendors

This New Year’s, make a resolution to reduce overhead, simplify logistics, and optimize your workflow: Consolidate vendors. Relying on a multitude of vendors is counterintuitive to efficiency in processes, communication, OPEX, and site-to-site standardization. Not only might you have separate vendors for various aspects of your operations, you might even have five, ten, or more vendors to support your different lines of hardware. With that many vendors to manage, your lean IT team might not know who to contact when your servers start to fail or even when your contracts are due for renewal. Resolve to Stop Falling Behind Without knowing your maintenance contact renewal dates—or vendor contacts—it’s almost impossible to know whether your support has lapsed. Meaning, if your hardware starts failing, your OEM could charge you exorbitant fees to [...]

FixIT: Dell System Fails to Power on After Power Supply Replacement

When any maintenance issues arise in your data center, the CentricsIT FixIT experts are here to help. With this rare and unexpected Dell server issue, CentricsIT walks you through how to fix your Dell system when you've replaced a failed power supply with a known new/good one of the same part number, but your Dell system fails to power on. You know your power supply is good, and all power supply lights are green. So, your Dell system not powering on doesn’t make any sense. You know the issue doesn’t lie in the hardware you just replaced, so you need to turn to another avenue to find the solution. The Problem Causing Your Dell System to Fail to Power On? Firmware This issue does not occur often. But, when it [...]

CentricsIT Profiled in Gartner Market Guide for Third-Party Maintenance

ATLANTA, September 9, 2019—Leading IT research firm Gartner has released its official market guide for Data Center and Network Third-Party Hardware Maintenance featuring CentricsIT as a representative vendor. Gartner releases report titled, “Market Guide for Data Center and Network Third-Party Hardware Maintenance,” compiled by Rob Schafer, Christine Tenneson, Mike Toussaint, and Daniel Bowers. This report was published on August 29, 2019. Readers must be a Gartner subscriber to access the full report (Gartner ID: G00414695). Gartner released its Market Guide for Data Center and Network Third-Party Hardware Maintenance in August 2019. CentricsIT is among the TPM providers listed as representative vendors.  The Atlanta-based company is profiled among other vendors, and the guide lists key findings to help IT leaders identify the benefits of third-party hardware maintenance. CentricsIT leadership supports the [...]

Preparing for IBM Power7 Going End-of-Service-Life (EOSL)

Perhaps you were fully expecting the End-of-Service-Life (EOSL) announcement for your POWER6 units; you bought them back in 2007, so it makes sense that IBM would already be starting the process of sunsetting them. What you might not have been expecting was the EOSL announcement to include your 8202-E4C POWER7s when these servers still work well in your environments. So, what are your options? 1.     Upgrade and Replace IBM Power7 Going EOSL: The IBM POWER9 IBM made its POWER6 and POWER7 announcements in preparation for a new generation of systems based on IBM’s Nimbus and Cumulus POWER9 chips. Fundamentally, POWER9 was built for data-intensive workloads with its optimized silicon, I/O subsystem technology, NVIDIA NVLink accelerators, PCIe Gen4, and OpenCAPI standards. POWER9 promises to accelerate bandwidth and compute options as well [...]

Third-Party Maintenance for IBM Netezza Reaching EOS

IBM is Pushing Early-Gen Netezza Users to Refresh—Know Your Options IBM recently announced the End-of-Support (EOS) date for the first three generations of Netezza products as June 30th, 2019. With this announcement, organizations using Skimmer (version N100-1), TwinFin (all N1001 versions), and Striper (all N2001 versions) are being pushed to begin the refresh process for hardware that still provides value. But companies have more options than spending massive amounts of CAPEX to refresh their data storage and analytics environments. IBM’s latest announcement is indicative of the typical OEM philosophy to force companies into a refresh, even organizations that aren’t ready to make the transition. With mission critical systems and complicated legacy applications still running on IBM Netezza EOS hardware, companies are now faced with an expedited refresh or loss of [...]

Knowing Your Options for Cisco Nexus 7000 End of Life

It seems like just yesterday that your Cisco Nexus 7000 was a brand-new product, but EOL for the Nexus 7000 was announced back in August of 2013, and EOSL was called the following year. More recently, it was announced that the last day to renew your support contracts was mid-November of this year, and the last day that you will receive “applicable service and support” from Cisco will be August 31, 2019. In short, the 7000s are well on their way to complete OEM retirement. But those 7000s could still be going strong in your environments. If you don’t have any complaints about performance or production, why fix what isn’t broken? Choosing to Take the Replacement Route In short, the Cisco Nexus 7700s are the most straightforward drop-in replacement solution [...]

Why Some Companies are Looking for Alternatives to Cloud

There’s no denying that cloud computing has its benefits. But, unfortunately, cloud is only truly beneficial when your applications and environments are fully optimized for it. If your company is still struggling to offset the costs of the migration and can’t seem to reduce your sky-high cloud bills each month, then it’s time to start triaging. Here’s why many companies are beginning to look for alternatives to cloud computing. Common Cloud Complexities that Have You Backtracking to Cloud Alternatives Consider the following cloud pain points: Customer Support and the Skills Gap Already-lean IT teams now must cover even more IT proficiencies. Because of this added strain, companies are turning to outsourcing to alleviate the pressure. With the current cloud and cybersecurity skills, finding the necessary expertise is proving difficult. Security [...]

Five Questions to Ask Your Third-Party Maintenance Provider

Change can be unnerving, especially when it involves the maintenance and support of your enterprise hardware. You trust the OEM to take care of your equipment, but the support costs are beginning to take a toll now that EOL has been called on your equipment. You need to find an alternative. One that doesn’t charge a premium. But one that provides the same level of service and the same quality replacement parts that you had before. To help calm your mind, we've put together a few questions to help you properly vet a potential Third-Party Maintenance (TPM) vendor. Five Key Questions to Ask Before You Sign 1.   How Global Are You? Considerations: If you are a multinational company, you need a vendor that can support you and have boots on [...]

Gartner’s Take on IT Cost Optimizations with Third-Party Maintenance

Your CFO probably doesn’t have a thorough understanding of what occurs in the data center from day-to-day. That’s okay. It’s not your CFO’s job. But that means, when you need budgetary approval for upcoming IT projects, you might need to make a case for other cost optimization strategies before you can make your new budget pitch. To address this need, Gartner, in its guide “IT Cost Optimization Principles” shares best practices for how to optimize your IT spend and maximize business value without compromising production. Gartner’s answer? Third-party maintenance. Gartner’s IT Cost Optimization Principles In addition to conducting over a decade of IT cost optimization research, Gartner also analyzed the “results of multiple national and regional recessions [and] the Great Recession” to establish a practical methodology for IT leaders and [...]