NetCare ServerCare is a mix of both proactive and reactive services that we provide to all clients on our Essentials, Gold and Platinum plans. It’s not just an insurance policy – it also maximises our chances of nipping a problem in the bud because we actively monitor and respond to the event logs on your server(s) all day every day.

We can do this as a result of new remote monitoring software we installed recently. This software allows us to now monitor your hardware as well as your operating system.

And ServerCare extends beyond hardware failure to also cover your server for any catastrophic operating system failure that may occur.

Essentially, we do our absolute best to keep your server operating reliably and optimally and in the event that a worst case scenario does occur and your server ends up needing a full software rebuild, we will do it as quickly as we can as part of the ServerCare service. You do not receive an ugly bill for the rebuild.

There’s also a fantastic ServerCare feature that we use to ensure your downtime is minimized – we install specialized image copy software that makes daily copies of your complete server image. Following a catastrophic server failure, we use this image copy to get your server back up and running again within a few hours. To implement this we provide a high capacity external disk drive and we use this disk drive to store multiple image backups as an additional safety net to your normal backup process.

Initial installation and testing of NetCare ServerCare is $390 (plus GST) which includes the cost of the 2TB external hard disk drive.

ServerCare covers you for catastrophic server software failure caused by the following events:

- Catastrophic server hardware failure;

- Sudden power loss resulting in a server crashing; and

- Unrecoverable Operating System software corruption (for example a crash caused by a virus that has got through the anti-virus defences).

ServerCare is more than just an insurance policy. An insurance policy covers you for rectification if something bad happens. This is certainly a feature of ServerCare but it also goes one significant step further because it also reduces the chance of something bad happening in the first place.

NetCare recommends that all our clients use ServerCare in addition to their standard backup solution because of the additional peace-of-mind it offers.

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.