@scottalanmiller said:

Are towers always cheaper?

In the secondary market, rack servers are cheaper. We rarely see towers in any of our bulk purchases and the lack of supply keeps the prices up. A similar rack could be $1,000 less than the tower.

You can tag in this forum?

On the Dell side, be aware that you need the RAID controller with the 1GB NV RAM in order to enable cachecade on their servers. Both the H700 and H710P have the capabilities. Dell will tell you that you must use their SSD drives as the cachecade drives, but we have behnchmarked other SSD drives in our lab and verified that they work fine and achieve similar results.

Here is something that can help both end users and MSP's. If you are working on a large project, we can setup your current environment in our lab, do a benchmark, setup your new environment, and then show the performance gains. You could then take the results to your management or customer and show them real world benefits and not just manufacturer data sheets.

@RoguePacket Did the wall mounting go well? Easy to maintain?

@RoguePacket said:

@ryan-from-xbyte Got one which did just that.... They were very insistent.

One of our reps was very insistent????

@Nara I love that pickle video. We are definitely a company that goes out of our way for customers. We had a customer who needed a server in costa rica the next day. We built the server in the morning and then one of our engineers jumped on a plane, checked the server as luggage, and had it up and running the next day. It's had to explain to prospective customers the benefits of a pickle giving company when nothing is going wrong.

Great feedback so far on this. If anyone has a specialty, send me a chat with the info and your location and I will pass it on to our reps. We will try to connect you with our end user customers if one of them is struggling in that area.

One of our reps recommended the following option for SMBs looking for a solution if they don't have a rack. What do you think? This would allow them to save money buying a rack server instead of a tower without needing to have the rack.

http://www.racksolutions.com/wallmount-rack.html

@scottalanmiller said:

@ryan-from-xbyte said:

@scottalanmiller 9 years out of a desktop is amazing.

Not so much these days. Most people upgrade their desktops for weird reasons. I've not seen many replacements for business or performance reason, at least with IT staff. Seems to be gaming driving most updates and not work.

In the past, wouldn't the new operating systems push the need for new desktops?

@scottalanmiller 9 years out of a desktop is amazing.

@Nara said:

@ryan-from-xbyte said:

Our biggest hurdle is customers who have their servers hosted at a datacenter. The extra step of having to go to another facility makes a non-onsite warranty difficult to use.

But since the equipment's in a datacenter, the power's generally cleaner, and the environment's favorable on the servers. Wouldn't that generally result in lower failure rates? Most datacenters I've been to have workbenches to do hardware work and space for customers or remote hands to get work done while they wait for a tech.

The issue is not the space to do the work, but having to travel to the datacenter to do the work. We offer a next business day warranty which is great for those with inhouse servers or local access to the servers, but when it can be challenging if they have to travel an hour to get to the datacenter. Some datacenters will offer remote hands, but it may be an extra charge that they have to factor in when comparing their options.

We are starting to work out deals with more datacenters to include remote hands with hosting if we bring them customers. These partnerships will eliminate that issue.

You shouldn't have to click to make search visible.

For those of already using this forum, it is easy to find the search. New people may not see it and then may leave because they don't feel like they can find what they need.

@Hubtech I am now. I didn't know that was a chat request. I thought it was just telling me that you were online. I just received your request and will work something up. I am going over to my mother's for her birthday, so I won't be able to get you anything until tomorrow AM.

Our biggest hurdle is customers who have their servers hosted at a datacenter. The extra step of having to go to another facility makes a non-onsite warranty difficult to use.

@Nara How do you handle that now? Even a 4-hour response warranty would result in a half day downtime.

@Nara some of our customers use some of their savings to buy extra parts to have in the shelf. They can then swap out in case of a failure. That gives them even less downtime than having a 4 hour warranty.

@Hubtech we actually don't sell any refurb desktops. If you sell the desktops, we should get talk about partnering in some deals.

@Hubtech everything we sell has at least 1 year warranty. Our day center pulls have 1 year. Our bulk buys from Dell's cancelled orders have 3 year with some stuff covered by Dell (original config) and the rest covered by us. Anything we have labeled "refurb" has actually never been used. We have to call it refurb because it is not being sold directly by Dell and our contract with them controls the descriptions we use.

We (xbyte) sell "refurbished" and used servers and run into issues where MSPs are reluctant to recommend them to clients. How many of you fall into that reluctant category and why?

@Katie If you guys want to do any Tampa/Orlando/Sarasota Mango Meetups,let us know.

We can also host trainings or other IT events at our facility in Sarasota. Our training room can hold about 30 people and we have a cafeteria area for socializing.