Summary: Sun third party hardware maintenance

[Brad Christofferson]

I recently posted a question about third party Sun maintenance.  The
response was good with most people favoring Motorola to provide the
service. One of the responses favored staying with Sun after bad
experiences with other third party hardware maintenance.  

A summary of the various companies available and recommendations follows:

The original posting:

>I am investigating alternative sources of hardware maintenance for our Sun
>workstations and Fileservers.  Our company is located in the South San
>Francisco Bay area near Silicon Valley.  

>While Sun provides extremely good service for our hardware, we are looking
>for more cost effective ways to maintain our systems.

One vote for staying with Sun:

  We have had experience with both Honeywell and McDonell-Douglas (sp?),
  and found both of them to be practically useless. We also tried one
  other company that I can't remember, with the same results: crap. We
  finally decided that it was well worth the (actually small) extra cost
  to go back to Sun, and we have been nothing but happy ever since. I
  cannot recommend to you that you attempt to use anyone but Sun. There
  may be SOMEBODY out there that is as good as Sun has been, but our
  extensive searches have not been able to find anyone! Basically, we
  found that we lost far more in engineering downtime than was saved by
  using a cheaper service, and they were incompetent and ill-stocked
  (despite emphatic promises to the contrary from all of them),
  resulting in excessively long repair cycles. Also, some of the
  replacement equipment they brought was as bad off (or worse!) than the
  equipment they were trying to repair! Keep your sanity, stick with
  Sun!

Other third party maintenance recommendations:

[...]

Hi Brad.  I understand your problem.  I know that Sun has established a
"strategic partnership" with Bell Atlantic (aka Sorbus/CDC) out here on
the East Coast.  I'm quite sure that Kodak is the representitive in your
area.

I don't think that you will find an annointed Sun maintainer *Really* cost
competitive.  I'm going with Sorbus because they have been doing an
excellent job of maintaining my Mainframe and PC gear.  - I'm after a
single butt to kick.

[...]

We have had good experience with Motorola Computer Systems Divison.  I am
SURE they have a an office in Silicon Valley, since they are a divison of
'the' motorola !!

The main number to call for Motorola field service is 800 222 5640.

[...]

We too are looking into 3rd party maint. for our suns.
We have found several other sources:
Polaris Service 800 541 5831 
Apex 800 654 8222

I have experience with neither, and am actually one of the weird people
that LIKE sun supplied service. My only complaint is the cost (Polaris and
several others quoted us at about 50% of Sun's cost).

I am leary of using non-Sun maintenance for software support.

There will probably be several such vendors at the upcoming Sun conference
(dec, 90)

[Note from Brad:  Is this the Sun User Group Conference?  I plan to go,
the SUG conferences I have attended in the past have been very good and
informative.  It is being held at the San Jose Convention Center, December
2-5.  The Sug office phone number is 415 336 4341.]

[...]

Motorola Field Service Division does Sun maintenance.  I checked with them
over the summer, looking into a contract for my (then-unpurchased) SLC.
They certainly do maintenance on Sun 3's, and said they did for 4's (but
they had not yet heard of the 4/20 a.k.a.  SLC).

[...]

We have been using Maintech, a division of Volt Dela Resources, Inc., for
one year now. They have been very good and we are very pleased with their
hardware service. Their cost was considerably cheaper than Sun and still
is. If you do go with third party hardware service, your software
maintenance cost will go up. But even though Maintech is still cheaper.

They have a district service center in SanFrancisco. I have an Orange
county number of 1-714-921-7600 and a service number of 1-800-553-2232.

[...]

My friend in Seattle is getting maintenance from Motorola.  He is quite
pleased with them.  I know that they do maintenance in Utah, so you
shouldn't have problems finding where you are.

[...]

Out here, DEC is so bad that I wouldn't even recommend them to my most
deeply despised competitor.  We just cancelled the service contract on
three Vaxen and handed it to a third party.  Having DEC maintain non-DEC
workstations is asking for trouble.

You might check out Bell Atlantic/Sorbus.  That's who we're trying next,
and they have a national deal with Sun to cover the areas Sun doesn't.

[...]

I checked with our local Xerox service office, and they handle Suns.

Xerox!  Now I've heard it all...

Thanks to all for their responses,

Brad