COMMON QUESTIONS
What third-party maintenance can do, and what it cannot
Third-party maintenance is still an unfamiliar way to buy support. This page puts our answers on the record, including the parts we cannot do and the parts we will not do.
Does using a third-party maintainer void the manufacturer’s warranty?
If someone opens the chassis, yes. So we do not open in-warranty hardware.
H3C’s standard limited warranty terms list “installing, removing, reconfiguring or replacing hardware or software without H3C’s permission” as grounds for loss of warranty. Lenovo’s general terms for extended warranty and technical services likewise exclude equipment that “has been installed, repaired or disassembled by service personnel not authorised by Lenovo”, and exclude equipment using “non-standard expansion components not certified by Lenovo”.
The terms are unambiguous, so we handle the two categories separately:
Out-of-warranty hardware — full maintenance. Fault intake, remote diagnosis, parts, site attendance, replacement, verification and failed-part recovery, all carried by us.
In-warranty hardware — single point of contact only, with your warranty untouched. That means: one 24×7 intake channel, first-line fault assessment, raising and tracking the manufacturer’s ticket on your behalf through to closure, escorting the manufacturer’s engineer on site, coordinating parts and stock status, and holding every brand’s tickets in one reconciliation ledger. Anything involving opening the chassis or replacing a part is performed by the manufacturer. We do not touch it.
The point of this is straightforward: a machine room running six or seven brands under warranty contracts with different expiry dates becomes one phone number for you — while every right you hold under the manufacturer’s terms stays intact.
Three to six months before a manufacturer warranty expires is the sensible point to move that hardware from “single point of contact” to full maintenance. We prepare the list and the pricing ahead of the date.
After warranty expiry, can firmware and microcode still be updated?
It depends on the manufacturer, and we do not make commitments on their behalf.
Two things are established. IBM has applied entitlement checking to Machine Code updates by machine type and serial number since January 2014, and makes them available only for machines under warranty or covered by an IBM hardware maintenance agreement. Oracle likewise requires a valid support contract or hardware warranty for firmware downloads.
The practical consequence is that out-of-warranty estates are maintained against their existing firmware baseline, rather than on the assumption that firmware can be brought current. This is exactly why we record a firmware baseline against every part number in stock — two parts with identical specifications will not go in if the baseline does not match.
Before contract, we set out the firmware position of your estate as it actually stands. Any supplier telling you everything can be updated should be asked to show the basis for it.
Are your parts new or pulled from decommissioned systems?
Both, depending on the part number and your requirements — and the quote states which.
For discontinued equipment there are no new parts left on the market. The only sources are decommissioned-system pulls, end-of-line channel stock, and customer spare-machine pulls. That is the state of the market, not a choice any supplier makes.
Our acceptance standard for pulled parts is fixed:
- Power-on test record
- Physical inspection and serial number check
- Two units held from the same batch for older parts
- An observation period after replacement
- Batteries managed by manufacture date, rotated on schedule, withdrawn when out of date
Worth noting: manufacturer replacement parts are not necessarily new either. H3C’s own warranty terms state that a replacement part “may be new or a refurbished unit of equivalent class, function and quality”.
Are third-party engineers actually competent?
We do not ask you to take this on faith. The engineer pool is tagged by brand, model, city and site-access clearance, and dispatch matches model experience and clearance rather than simple availability. Before signing, you can ask to see the service record for a specific model.
One further point: manufacturer engineers are generally expert in their own products, while a machine room typically runs six or seven brands side by side. Cross-brand diagnosis — a controller replaced and the disks not claimed afterwards, one PSU path failing and throttling the whole chassis — is the situation we handle more often, not less.
On cross-border work, who carries the responsibility?
We are the contracting party. Not a subcontractor.
For overseas sites we ship from our own stocking hubs (13 countries) and use locally notified engineers for site access, so the chain of responsibility does not break in the middle. Customs documentation and HS coding are handled by us.
The contractual end point of delivery is “customer sign-off obtained and failed part recovered“, not “part despatched”. Between those two sit customs clearance, site notification, access control, replacement, verification and ledger reconciliation.
Can you maintain Chinese-manufactured hardware?
Yes, and this is our main structural difference from the international firms.
Their published brand lists contain no Chinese manufacturers; Chinese outsourcing firms mostly have no overseas stocking network. For a mixed estate holding both existing Dell/HPE hardware and newly deployed domestic hardware, it is currently difficult to find one supplier that can carry both.
Models covered are listed on the Services page.
How much cheaper are you than the manufacturer?
We do not publish a percentage.
It is standard in this industry to advertise savings of 30% to 70% against manufacturer maintenance, but no one publishes the basis of the calculation — first year versus first year, five-year total cost, or renewal pricing after the manufacturer’s post-warranty increase, produce very different figures. A number without its basis is not useful for a procurement decision.
What we do instead: send the device list, and we cost it line by line by model, quantity, location and required response level, so the result can be set directly against the manufacturer renewal quote you are holding.
The manufacturer terms and standards quoted on this page are sourced on the Sources and references page — open them and check for yourself.
What we do not do
Stated plainly, so it does not become an argument later:
- No work on in-warranty hardware — see question 1
- No commitment to firmware upgrades on out-of-warranty hardware — see question 2
- No whole-unit replacement within the manufacturer’s authorised process (RMA) — that is the manufacturer’s action
- No verbal timing commitments outside the contract — all timings are agreed line by line against the device list; see the response definitions on the Services page
- No absorbing your compliance risk under the manufacturer’s terms — if an action could affect your agreement with the manufacturer, we raise it before touching anything
Anything not covered here, just ask. See Contact; a person replies within 24 hours.