LMS Warranty

[Lucas Iaccarino]

Hello all...
I´m looking to replace my 7-year-old Dell-based LMS and I would like to be sure about the warranty.

How much time is the usual time for this really expensive equipment? It´s true that they are professional equipment build-to-last but I prefer to relax for at least 5 years before making this kind of move.

Thank you

[Marcel Birgelen]

If you buy a new server from Dell, the maximum warranty (Pro Support) you can get on new equipment is usually limited to 5 years, but usually, about 6 months or so, before the warranty expires, they'll offer you a warranty extension of a maximum of about two years. This last one isn't guaranteed though.

[Lucas Iaccarino]

Thanks Marcel for your answer. So DELL or any major SERVER vendor should offer some kind of 5 year warranty (paid or not).
And do you know if using hard drives that are not sold by DELL expires that warranty?
¿Do you have any experiences with integrators that sold you TMS like Cinemanext or UNIQ? How much they offer?

Thank you all

[Marcel Birgelen]

Most major server suppliers, including Dell and HPE offer up to 5 year professional warranty in several tiers, like Next Business Day, 4-hour on-site, etc. Many of them allow you to extend those support contracts for an additional year or two, as long as you're the first owner of the hardware.

Regarding using non-Dell drives... Yeah, those big brand suppliers charge a premium for drives, but beware of using your own drives. At least over here, Dell is kind enough not to void your warranty when you use third-party drives, but they sure won't honor any warranty claims with anything that touches storage. Unfortunately, we've had several problems with their PERC RAID controllers over the years, including dead controllers, bad firmware resulting in abysmal performance and RAID arrays refusing to rebuild. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have honored any support calls under warranty if we wouldn't have used "Dell stock drives".

As for UNIQ, I don't have any hands-on experience with them and as for Cinemanext, I only have local experience with them, as you're in Argentina, your experience may be quite a different one. If you buy a TMS with server from them, you usually get Dell hardware with the same support conditions Dell offers. Additionally, they sell support contracts for their TMS software, but this can also be gotten without the hardware. Cinemanext support contracts for software usually don't have a specific hard end-date, so they can be renewed as long as you want and they still supports the TMS software. If you want an integrated solution and just a single entity to call, the best solution probably is to buy everything via your integrator of choice, although that may not be the cheapest solution.

[Lucas Iaccarino]

Thanks Marcel again,
When you said the PERC RAID controllers issues, you said that using not "Dell Stock drives" would void the warranty? I´m not really concern about the Storage (I have a redundancy setup in case of something like that) or Technical support (we have our own tech team) but will be very messed up if they refuse to fix hardware issues and I have to buy a new motherboard for example.

I know we are working over theory, but what do you think?

[Marcel Birgelen]

Here in Europe or at least the EU, it would be legally questionable to cancel your warranty for something like this. Still, you really need to check your local warranty contracts and what your local laws have to say about this. But what they legally still can and will do, is to refuse to help you on your issue, if your issue is storage related for example.

In our case, all the drives were bought via Dell themselves, so they never made an issue out of it.

But... one of their service engineers did make an issue out of something different once, something rather stupid...

If you put in 10GE or 40GE cards with SFPs, Dell forces you to buy Dell branded SFPs, or otherwise the network controller wouldn't recognize them.

We had a completely unrelated issue with VMWare once, which Dell answered with a firmware update. But this firmware update flashed a non-Dell-branded firmware onto the Intel network controllers. After I rebooted the machine, this now Intel-branded network controller started to refuse accepting premium-priced, Dell-branded SFPs. Luckily, I still had some Intel branded SFPs at hand, so I put those in there and it worked, again... Dell's own support was apparently defeated, because the service tech that appeared a few hours later couldn't deliver any working solution without my Intel branded SFPs... so my Intel SFPs remained.

It wasn't until a later service call, when the motherboard died (this particular machine really must have been a Monday-morning model), that the on-site service engineer started blaming me for not using Dell-branded SFPs... Because his latest updates he applied to the entire system also updated the Network Interfaces, who now only wanted to accept Dell-branded SFPs again... We had since used those SFPs for other purposes, so I put in some programmable SFPs, which I gave the Dell brand, but the service engineer wasn't happy about it. I told him, that this was Dell's own fault, because they screwed up in a previous firmware update and they didn't deliver me any fix within the 4-hour service frame, so I took matters in my own hands, but apparently, that defied his logic.

Anyway, Dell has since honored other service calls for the machine, despite the "non-genuine" Dell-branded SFPs in there... The latest thing that died was some part of the iDRAC controller, that apparently needed the front bezel to be changed...

This whole thing may make Dell look horrible, but I've had far worse horror stories with almost almost any other supplier, all in all, I'm relatively pleased with their services over the years.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Hello all...
I´m looking to replace my 7-year-old Dell-based LMS and I would like to be sure about the warranty.

How much time is the usual time for this really expensive equipment? It´s true that they are professional equipment build-to-last but I prefer to relax for at least 5 years before making this kind of move.

Thank you

I used Dell servers exclusively for the LMS systems I built. But a little more info would help here such as model and configuration of the present server. I started back when the 2950 was the go to server and almost all of those are still running just fine. I also used a few model 2900 towers for smaller cinemas. A few of the rack servers were replaced about three years ago with later model Dells of the same configuration. Keeping them clean inside is the key to long life of these in theaters, as none operate in a clean room environment.

[Dennis Benjamin]

We build out our own servers for our LMS set ups. We do have some Dell Poweredge servers at some of our locations. But we find it more cost effective to build custom servers for the job.