Blade Watch

I was having a chat with a SME who was asking me for advice in their hardware support contract:

“There are so many options to choose for in response times, and they were asking if I need 5 nines availability, what does that mean?”

So let’s break it down.

When requesting a support contract, the two key things that will be discussed are:

• Availability
• Response times

When we discuss availability you’ll here the phrase 5×9’s or 99.999% up time or available. By that I mean, if we take one business year, (to avoid debate 365 days) which means we only have minutes of unscheduled downtime per year.

This is a core component of cost, so do understand when you ask for a solution it’s built in, for your trading application, your broadband, your core IT services you might need this, for your desktop/laptop or for your intranet it might be 95% or 99%.

Response times, this can cover two things, the transaction time – how long it takes for the server/application to say yes that’s purchased or that’s done, or for hardware/software it might be how long it takes to acknowledge and respond to an issue.

• So on our bought in credit report application we might want a 5 minute response time, I click calculate my exposure, and I will wait up to 5 minutes for the data to be presented to me in a nice graph or spreadsheet. This might change for my end of month, end of day reports.
• For our servers, we might have a generic four hour response. So From the time I call my service provider, with the server name, model type, serial number and issue, the hardware vendor has four hours to respond, acknowledge the call and have an engineer arrive on site.

Your availability, your response times will be driven by your business requirements, but consider how making slight changes can drastically affect your support costs, consider the business risk vs cost, (though there are exclusions to the rule). For example, you might find that it’s cheaper to request a lower response or availability level of support which you can then pay a fee to upgrade it when you need it.

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