Blade Watch

Who should pay to upgrade fibre cards? IT or the application teams?

I was having a chat with one of the project managers for a relatively small hedge fund in the London area. He was involved in a SAN storage upgrade project, basically the IT team are moving their storage from one storage rig or device to the other. 70% of the servers are fine, running relatively new Emulex fibre cards and these can be migrated to the new san storage unit.

• However, there is a problem which is threatening to derail his project:
• Who pays to replace the fibre cards that are not supported? He has budget but not to buy new cards.
• If he buys them does that set a precedent for IT to be retrospectively paying to upgrade components as they reach end of life.
• What is the deemed life span of a fibre card and is that a component that is a business cost or a business as usual cost?
• What are the defined terms of support and are they agreed?

We’ll have to see, I believe conversations are being had, sign off approved, these concepts can seem unimportant and in a million pound project a few thousand pounds could be seen so, however it’s often the little things that cause the most issue. A few sample statements I got told about:

1. “How long have you know my cards are out of support”
2. “What actions have you taken to report that my cards are out of support”
3. “What kind of testing and due diligence will need to be actioned before ordering new cards”
4. “What deemed outage will there be to upgrade the cards?”
5. “If we’re already out of support, is it actually an issue to move to another out of support configuration?”

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