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Disk Placement considered as Remote Hand charges?
What is the general practice for remote hand charges when it comes to placement of a new disk into a server? My datacenter has free basic RH and clearly says free hot swap bay modifications but is insisting on placing disk into the server as RH since they need to put a caddy on it. Any adivse on this would be a help.
Comments
You can use their remote hands to put it in a caddy for a fee or have a spare in a caddy in your rack ready for hot swap and then use their free basic RH to hot swap it.
You agreed to (an already very generous) setup where the DC tech will spend <5 minutes for a tool-less operation free of charge from time to time. DC tech having to go to the logistics, pick up a package, unpack it, put the drive in a caddy (as well as find the caddy first) and put the screws in is no longer a tool-less quick job hence why they are charging you.
In the enterprise datacenter world you'd often be looking at minimum 1h at ~$200+ with some of the popular facilities to even do a hot swap.
its literally a five min job to put a drive into a caddy. Anyways thanks for your response. i'll see if any one else has to share thoughts.
For remote hands, you have to realize just like when you go to a restaurant, you're not just paying for the labor. You're paying for all of the time that the chef (or tech) is sitting around doing nothing, the time that they're training, their equipment, office space/rent, utilities, et cetera. To say something is "a 5 minute job and I deserve it for free" is really obnoxious to what it means to have someone on site 24x7.
That being said, I've never colocated with anyone that has charged for hot-swap replacement or button presses. Everything else is up for a charge. Sometimes they'll waive it because they are paying the tech to be there, he's working regardless of them doing something additional small for me in between his other tickets. Sometimes you're with a reseller who is hiring the datacenter's remote hands and will always pass along the cost to you.
There is no five minute job though. Every job is 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. You are just requesting a small slice of that, which may not make it viable to staff. Thus minimums.
Now, all of that being said: the issue is whether or not putting a drive into a caddy is counted as part of free "hot-swap" service. By definition, I don't think it is. I think most providers would probably waive it once or the first time, but obviously no guarantees especially if they have to pay a datacenter tech to do it. Something to consider in the future, who is staffing the remote hands.
I looked at colo in Asia and the remote hands was $500/hr... through the datacenter.. I understood that for something like this, I'd have to pay $500 and as such, did not go through with that vendor.
We do all that for free for our colo clients. Install HDS/CPUS/memory etc.
Every datacenter is different though.
Just got a ram upgrade today (Vietnam, APAC)
I bought 64 Gigs of DDR4 RAM for around 150$ with no installation cost. I also got a free disk replacement remote hand earlier this year
The colos is around 70$/m with 10 IPs, 1Gbps up/down and unlimited BW
Some of Vietnamese vendor are providing 10$/y for 1 Xeon Gold core + 2GB ram + 25GB NVME but still profitable because price for DC in here is getting cheaper recently
Hello,
I'm very interested in this Vietnamese vendor providing 10$/y for 1 Xeon Gold core + 2GB ram + 25GB NVME.
Could you tell us more?
im also very interested
Joining the queue of interested people
Hi,
quiet normal actually.
I pay money to receive packages in the datacenter...
Try to find a definition in the contracts what are basic remotehands exactly and based on this, you can move on.
But its of course a difference with or without mounting disks into a caddy.
may be i am more acustomed to the free RH by fiberstate...their support was excellent...at one point in time i didn't even knew that reinstalling os was considered RH until they said that I have volimnious RH requests...but still great support and i dont even have to tell them where to look for issues most of the time..where as in the other case you literally have to guide them what to do. Sometimes i wonder what if my switch gets faulty my whole rack will be down as they ask for power cable, lan cable and even rack rails to be provided by me where as fiberstate provides their own switch, cables, rack rails and i dont even need to worry about anything. Whenever ill choose my next provider these mistakes will surely help me out.
IMO it depends on WHY. If due to disk problems then no charge, if due to customer wanting a new, another e.g. larger disk then RH (charged).
Depends on the service...
If we are talking dedicated servers and its an "upgrade" (that was ordered and is getting paid for) or replacement (due to failure) then i would expect any reasonable provider not to charge you extra for that.
If we are talking colocation (which is the more likely case here), it depends on the provider. For me, if its something that can be "scheduled" and is a quick task (ie: plug in drive that was already shipped in a caddy and can just be "plugged" in), then that'd be free. If its a "we need this now" kind of thing, or it involves extra work (ie: client ships a drive, for a caddy they already have in the server and i need to supply screws to mount the drive in the caddy... or its a "replace old drive in caddy with new drive") then that's going to be something that comes with a charge/fee. That said, i think most colo/server providers will easily be able to give you either an estimate how much a task is likely to cost or at least tell you their remote-hands fees ahead of time.
Well the difference is companies like Fiberstate, OPLink, etc that do free hands either own the facility or have their own employees on site 24/7, they don't make money just by leasing space and hands work, they make money doing actual hosting stuff too. Datacenters that are charging $200/h+ for hands work are just techs employed by commercial datacenter buildings that have nothing to do with the tenants. Often why those remote hands aren't quick and turn a 5 minute task into 30 minutes. Cheaper to find local remote hands contractors.
Everyone seems to be wanting to get a payday on remote hands now.
I've been dealing with trying to get a drive checked/swapped in Miami and Hivelocity is trying to charge $200/hour, minimum 1 hour work. They want to charge 1 hour to confirm the and pull the bad drive, and then another 1 hour it looks like to swap the drive.
I think Equinix is also going a bit retarded on remote hands now?
Fiberhub has been good to us when I don't feel like driving in and will charge 15 minutes or so for work.
Telehouse has also been fair with a.. $150/hour rate? But in 15 minute increases. They've pooled work together as well (a drive swap, a cable swap, a server racking, in one work session) to make it reasonable as well.
Francisco
They are H2Cloud, you can search for it, I won't give a link on this forum.
Right now, they have the plan of 1 Core CPU Platinum 8171M, 2 GB RAM DDR4 2666MHz, 20 GB NVMe U.2 – vSAN at 15$/year (only bank transfer)
They sometimes do promotion to double the topup (really often) to 50% of the topup, so you will get it for 10$/y.
The plan I got was 0,76$/month, monthly payment but it was a xeon gold instead.
Thanks. What are the connection speeds? Can you do a speedtest?
“Free” and “included in the price” are quite different concepts. It may be that the OP's DC is charging him less than you would so can't be as generous with their tech's hands-on time.
[Or, of course, you might be an absolute bargain!]
In CoreSite LA2, we pay $225 per hour for remote hands: 30 minute (initial) + 15 minute increments are the minimum that can be billed. Anything, including drive swaps, requires the remote hands fee to be paid.
If you need a technician dispatched within 24 hours, there is an additional $450 fee attached to it. Otherwise, it could take somewhere between 1-2 days for them to respond.
Their remote hands are not particularly good either.
Unfortunately, we are somewhat reliant on them in this location for small tasks simply because I don't know anyone who lives close enough to CoreSite LA2. It's also the reason why we usually don't sell dedicated servers or colocation in this PoP, and instead restrict it to VPS products.
Then, you have NOCIX on the other side of the spectrum. A lot of their tasks are free (e.g., server racking, drive swaps, etc). I would be perfectly fine paying their rate for remote hands, but for some reason, a lot of their tasks are just free.
In our other locations, we need to pay remote hands no matter what the task is.