6 Strategies for Post Warranty Maintenance and Support

No matter how long any warranty is, it always seems that the moment it expires is when things start going horribly wrong. It’s as true in your data center as it is with cars and phones.  Once the initial warranty on a server or storage array expires, it can affect your entire stack -- and the critical apps and workloads that drive your business. The challenges can include: 

• Delays or even stoppages of further development, updates, or improvements to a particular product or product line;

• No further technical support from the original vendor;

• Access to spare parts will be drastically slowed or more difficult to secure;

• No compatibility with new features, existing features or functionality limited or unavailable.

It may seem like your options are limited as warranties expire. But failure is not an option for the infrastructure that provides the backbone of your organization, even when budgets are strained by other priorities. Extending its useful life and protecting its future value are essential.  

Your data center affects more than just your business - it affects everyone who works with your business, and their customers.  You want to be sure the post-warranty lives of your storage, network and compute systems are in the hands of reputable, reliable partners who are ready and able to tackle any problems that might arise in a timely manner. 

Here are six strategies to approach post-warranty maintenance.

1. Hardware refresh

A way to reduce the risk of system failure is to replace your hardware as soon as the warranty expires. This is the most straightforward or cost-effective approach to maintaining operations. Not only do you have to migrate your data to a new system (or, maybe even a new vendor), you also pay a premium for it. However, this option does ensure that your system is up-to-date and it has the benefit of providing you with a new service lease.

Remember, just because they’ve reached the end of warranty, these enterprise systems still have a lot of life in them, and can keep operating for years after a warranty expires. The warranty only represents the maximum amount of time a manufacturer has chosen to service the same equipment profitably. 

2. Warranty Renewal 

If a refresh isn’t in your budget, your hardware manufacturer will offer you the opportunity to renew your warranty. From your end, nothing changes. This is the most seamless way to extend your hardware’s shelf life and you can proceed as normal without worrying about replacements or DIY repair. However, equipment sales constitute the bulk of revenue for hardware manufacturers, and these policies are intentionally expensive to encourage equipment replacement and may not represent the true cost to maintain your systems post-warranty. 

3. DIY Maintenance

There is always a way to do it yourself. Depending on the condition of your hardware, DIY can be very expensive. It also assumes that you have access to miscellaneous OEM hardware for parts, high-level technicians, and a deep understanding of how things can fail in order to effectively stock spare parts for anticipated failures. In the multi-vendor environments most prevalent today, the ability to keep enough staff expertise and parts access in-house can be very prohibitive and potentially lead to outages and extended downtime

4. Third-Party Maintenance 

There is of course Third-Party Maintenance (TPM). These vendors are generally less expensive and provide the same service as a warranty renewal, and they have access to the miscellaneous parts you’d need for a DIY approach.  But, as is often the case, you get what you pay for.  They typically compete with the original manufacturer on price, maintain your systems’ status quo, and often do with approaches that are not vendor-endorsed. 

5. Move to the Cloud 

When hardware winds down, a window opens. The end of warranty might give you the opportunity to modernize your technology, and move some of your mission-critical assets to the cloud. Not a small undertaking, this route requires advanced planning, time, manpower, and new budget. It also requires you -- or a partner -- to migrate data, destroy or archive any sensitive data present on those systems, plus decommission and responsibly dispose of the hardware. 

6. Multi-Vendor Services 

Multi-Vendor Service (MVS) providers are agnostic in their breadth of multi-vendor capabilities, access to original parts, and the fact that they partner with instead of competing against all the leading infrastructure providers. Their goal is to provide the customer with the most usable datacenter to keep their business running smoothly. Generally, just as affordable, or more so, than a TPM, they can provide a holistic view into your data center, regardless of how many different OEMs’ hardware devices are on the floor. They also extend the lifespan of your infrastructure post-warranty, bringing level 3 engineers from multiple OEMs to ensure you the level of service and expertise your data center needs. 

Rather than an order taker, an MVS provider is a strategic partner that helps you own all stages of the data center lifecycle – from onboarding to end of service life, and all phases in between. That, of course, includes taking on day-to-day operations to free up your engineers for the modernization projects that are fueling the future of the business. 

Important Note

This is not widely known, but your OEM provider will have MVS capabilities and will support multiple product lines other than their own.  Tell your account manager that you want to discuss MVS.    

In summary

The end of a warranty doesn’t need to be equal with the end of a storage array, server or network device. Looking at all available options, working together with an MVS partner can give you the best of all worlds -- the highest-quality vendor-authorized services, aligned with your business’s strategic goals, and preserving more budget (and human capital) for future modernization efforts.