I’d like to start this blog by declaring openly that I think the ProLiant range of servers are fantastically reliable, superbly engineered and designed from the inside out for high performance. They’ve been my favourite brand of server since I started providing them to clients in 1992.

The standard warranty that comes with every ML350 HP ProLiant server is three years, on-site next-business-day. In most case our clients elect to upgrade this at the time of purchase to a 4 hour response and/or a warranty extension to 4 years.

However, it’s important to clarify what the standard on-site warranty provided by HP actually covers. In two words – “hardware only”. So in the unlikely event that a hardware component in your server fails over the course of its warranty life, HP will come on-site and replace that hardware component in a quick and effective fashion.

Sometimes that’s not enough… Recently, a client of ours had a server crash late one afternoon. The 3 year old server was in a dusty environment, its power supply fan became blocked, the main board heated up and some components failed. An HP engineer was onsite early the next morning to replace the necessary parts and after testing, announced that the hardware was now operational.

Unfortunately for the client, whilst the server hardware was fixed, the software still wouldn’t operate. And fixing this part of the problem is not done by the HP engineer - someone else (read NetCare) needs to fix the software. This important detail is covered off in the fine print of the warranty agreement and is common to all manufacturers – not just HP.

Fixing a software problem at this point often involves a lot of work. If NetCare can get the server operating again within a few hours, then all is pretty good. But if there’s still no sign of life at the 4 hour mark, then a big, expensive and complicated decision needs to be made. Do we keep going trying to recover, or do we cut our losses and rebuild the server software from scratch, incurring a fee to the client of up to $4000? And that doesn’t begin to count the business cost due to lost productivity.

In my next blog, I'll introduce our solution to this significant problem - NetCare ServerCare.