Support Questions

I recently received an email from Steve in the UK, and he had this question:

As we are in the UK, Barracuda has an office here, Kemp only 1 distributor and Coyote with almost nothing.

However, if support is light it maybe worth asking my sponsors to go the whole hog and acquire either a Juniper DX or f5 BIG IP 1500.

He’s concerned about support from vendors that aren’t in his area. To answer this question, I’ll explain how both the value market does support (KEMP, CoyotePoint, Barracuda), and how the premium market does support (F5, Juniper).

Both the value and premium vendors do remote support. The premium vendors will sometimes send out technicians to a site, but that’s typically for networking trouble shooting on a large-scale deployment. The value vendors do 99% of their support remotely. The premium vendors I would guess do 95% of their support remotely.

Local support is something that I only see with a huge deployment, and most of the local support is logistical or pre-sales, not necessarily technical. When issues arise, you call into an 800 number or email support. Even the local SEs generally tell you to open a ticket first. The issues are then tracked and addressed at a centralized location (like Seattle for F5). Again, it’s mostly remote.

For hardware problems, most of the hardware is non-serviceable even in the field. If a unit goes bad, or is even suspected of being bad, the most that is done is a few remote diagnostics to see if it’s a configuration or a hardware problem.  If it’s hardware, a replacement unit is shipped.  It’s not like a huge Cisco Cat 6500 and replacing a Sup card.  If a load balancer hardware goes bad, the entire unit is replaced.

So having a vendor with no local assets isn’t really an issue for load balancers. As long as they can get replacement parts to you in a decent amount of time, there’s not much a local presence can add.

So I wouldn’t be concerned if there are local offices or not. 90% of any issues you have can be resolved over email. The rest can be either phone support or hardware replacements.

Hope that answers your questions. Remember, if you’ve got any questions, just shoot an email to tony at lb digest dot com.