Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
> >anyone has a suggestion for how we can improve on > >beeing supported for drbd? > > > > I just looked at the price and it's seems to be incredibly expensive. > For one thing, it seems that duration of the contracts is for three > months. That in of itself is odd. Who wants support for such a short > period? Aren't most contracts a year? > Thanks for the input, I'll escalate that to sales. In any case, I'd like to hear some other voices on the matter, too. This could be an interessting discussion. And probably in the interesst of the drbd user comunity, too. A word to your examples: as you mention yourself, they _sell_ their software (or licenses), and in addition they offer support. Since drbd is GPL, people only pay for it if they have problems, or special demands. If we got some money for every usage of drbd, ... > To make any comparison meaningful, the cost needs to be extended out > for a year where applicable and for us in the US converted to US > dollars. > > basic support, 4 * 474 = $1896 > standard support, 4 * 1763 = $7052 > > By comparison, Canto, who sells a well-known digital archive > management solution, charges us $925 a year for what is essentially > equivalent to the standard support for drbd for our 5-user workgroup > server product. (A product whose database will be soon be protected by > drbd :).) Note this price is slightly discounted because we are an > educational institution, and the prices would go up as the number of > simultaneous clients goes up. > > By another comparison, Dantz, makers of a great cross-platform backup > solution, Retrospect, is charging us $610 for a yearly tech support > contract, the equivalent of the standard support contract above. This > price may also be a bit discounted because of our educational status. > > Either way, standard support for drbd is essentially an order of > magnitude more expensive. > > I suggest dropping installation support altogether and extending the > existing basic and standard support options to a year at their three > month price. Even then, it's not cheap. -- : Lars Ellenberg Tel +43-1-8178292-0 : : LINBIT Information Technologies GmbH Fax +43-1-8178292-82 : : Schoenbrunner Str. 244, A-1120 Vienna/Europe http://www.linbit.com : __ please use the "List-Reply" function of your email client.