By Sam | May 6, 2013

What Smart Hands Should You Expect From Your Hosting Provider?

So, you are thinking of hosting some hardware in a remote data center. You need it to be far away from your main site, but you also occasionally need to physically touch your equipment and don’t want to travel every time. If that’s the case, then this post is for you.

We know the value of not needing to drive or fly to our data center to do minor work. Even with remote tools, deploying a smart set of hands, eyes, feet, or fingers may be necessary for even minor work.

We include basic data center smart hands during local business hours for co-location clients as part of our ongoing services.  This means that if you need a power button pushed, a cable checked, or a CD inserted, our smart hand service can help you. Not all services are covered under our basic smart hand services.  As a general rule, anything that takes our support engineers 15 minutes or less to do is something we’ll do to help. Once the work hits 30 minutes, then we charge a basic smart hands fee based on an hourly rate.

Here are some examples of things that normally fall into our included basic 8am – 5pm local time smart hands service:

• Physically power cycling a firewall, router, switch, or server
• Re-seating a network, drive, or other cable
• Checking a network activity light, firewall status light on bezel, or looking for an error displayed on a console screen
• Receiving a CD, DVD, or Tape and placing it in your server or equipment
• Welcoming and escorting of pre-approved and scheduled vendors to a client’s equipment
• Replacing a patch cable in a rack (there may be a cost for the cable if OGO needs to provide it)
• Moving a client KVM to another server or system for a client in order to perform remote troubleshooting and maintenance

Here are some examples of things that fall outside of our basic service and are billable smart hands:

• Emergency service demanding immediate attention during business hours
• Emergency or urgent requests requiring support or smart hands outside of business hours
• Racking appliances, switches, routers, firewalls, servers, or other equipment
• Assisted troubleshooting of co-located equipment that takes support engineers 30min or longer in coordinated support with the client
• Un-racking, packing, and shipping equipment to another location

Our ultimate goal is to help you manage your co-located equipment as easily as possible without you needing to visit it on a regular basis.  Our basic smart hand services help you deal with the minor items needed, and our extended smart hands services give you the option to use our support engineers’ hands and brains to assist with more in-depth projects or troubleshooting.

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