Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.
Lars Ellenberg wrote: >>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. I don't know the usual expert-fee per hour of Linbit. But if I have to repair my car (window, heating etc.) they invoice me EUR 70 - 90 per hour. If I look at http://www.linbit.com/en/solutions/enterprise/linhac/drbd-support/ INSTALLATION support With this support package you get one month of installation support by email and acces to the prebuild RPMs for 12 month. Duration: 1 Month (+12 months access to all prebuild RPM's) Price excl. VAT: EUR 150,- This compares e.g. to VMWare Workstation USD ~200,- (license only) or WinXP EUR 160,- (license only). Applying a usal fee for an IT-expert the EUR 150,- covers ~2 hours, the BASIC SUPPORT EUR 390,- covers ~5 hours. If a customer consumes more hours of support to "get" ... "High-Availability Clusters running. All DRBD and cluster management software topics as well as related issues are covered." the customer is a winner (and Linbit the looser). E.g. the last package I developed needed 30 hours _after_ finishment - 10 hours change request, 2 hours repair and test of a bug, and 18 hours installation support. I would have been a big looser, if I commited to 5 hours of support (what I estimated). I think, it would be fair, to offer support on hourly base as an additional possibility. E.g. a customer can buy a bucket of 5 (10, 20 ...) hours and gets support as long as the hours are not consumed. Helmut Wollmersdorfer