$64,000 sixty-four-thousand-dollars ??

[John Rock]

Hi,

Our GSA appliance is only 3 years old and we're being told by Mountain View that it'll purely stop working comes support renewal date, forcing us to purchase from scratch actually, a new hardware appliance 7.0 and 36 month license/support ?? This is coming as a big surprise - we're inheriting the first contract from a former employee - what are the alternatives to that? what if we want to keep the current appliance instead? 

Thanks in advance for shedding a light!

[jasmine Tea]

Hi John - Just curious, for 64K, how many index document are you
licensed for? To answer your question, yes, that is how the Google
Search Appliance is licensed. A new hardware and a new license file
are sent to you every license renewal. You get to keep the hardware.
I think there is also an option for a 2 years license. You might
check with your Sales contact.

Good luck.

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[Dave Watts]

Actually, you did not purchase an appliance. You purchased a license
for service. The appliance is just a way to deliver that service. This
probably isn't what you want to hear, but that's the way it is.

This service approach does have its advantages. For example, if
anything goes wrong with your hardware under license, Google will
typically just send you a new box the very next day! The hardware is
just a way to deliver the service after all. That's quite a bit
different from a hardware-based approach - try getting Dell to send
you a new box like that.

In any case, Google makes it very clear during the sales process that
you aren't buying hardware, but a time-limited service. I do
sympathize with you - presumably you weren't included in this process
at all - but your alternatives are pretty limited. The GSA will stop
crawling, indexing, and serving thirty days after the license expires.
You can turn an unlicensed GSA into a generic Linux server - Google
has instructions on how to do that - but you won't be able to use it
for search.

Even if you renew your license, you'll still have to deploy a new
appliance. Google wants their customers to get the benefits of the
latest hardware when they renew.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
http://training.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on
GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

[Chris]

I'm fairly certain we just renewed all three of our GSA licenses and we didn't get any new boxes. When I took conrol of the GSA boxes we had about 3 months of license time left and now we have them until 2016. Maybe the server team made the swap without me noticing, but I doubt that was the case.

 

Interesting.

[Jeremy Garreau]

Can confirm that, you can ask to keep your appliance and just receive a new licence file instead. But there is just no point doing so.

[Dave Watts]

> I'm fairly certain we just renewed all three of our GSA licenses and we
> didn't get any new boxes. When I took conrol of the GSA boxes we had about 3
> months of license time left and now we have them until 2016. Maybe the
> server team made the swap without me noticing, but I doubt that was the
> case.
>
> Interesting.

I know that for all of our customers, they get new boxes when they
renew and do not have the option to continue using their existing
boxes with the new licenses. But I suspect the details of this vary
from market to market, etc.

[John Rock]

Dave Watts and all, thanks a lot for the quick answer, very good to be able to compare situations. Yes Dave you're right on the money, we hadn't seen the original terms of the first contract so this comes as a big surprise, and not too good of one indeed. Htla, we're licensed for 500,000 pages and unlimited collections and frontends.

This seems a lot more than what we need, I've got 47,481 indexed pages currently... and don't need 'unlimited' collections and frontends, perhaps less than 10 instead. 

Thanks for the tip, we should be able to s(h)ave here... 

I'm curious to see what other users pay vs. number of pages/collections/frontends.

Maximum number of collections:	unlimited
Maximum number of frontends:	unlimited
Maximum number of pages overall:	500,000

 

 

 

[Mathias Bierl]

What you have is the smallest available license for the GSA. 

[Dave Watts]

You already have the minimum license available. That said, it seems to
me like you're paying more for that minimum license than our customers
do.

If you're interested, feel free to contact me off-list with the
following information, and I'll ask our sales guys to see what they
can do for you:
- are you purchasing through a reseller?
- do you have a backup appliance as well?
- are you in the US or Canada?

[John Rock]

Got it, thank you for you answer.

Dave: OK will do!

[Steven King]

Also, frontends and collections is legacy licensing cruft from the
days where the licenses dictated those things.

Ultimately you're only buying a support licence and functionality
licence for the number of documents you are indexing.

Previous posters are correct, you should have asked for new boxes
(latest spec always better than 3yo spec), but ultimately if anything
happens to them your hardware support kicks in and you get new ones.

I always used to get asked if the purchase price of an appliance for
documents up to 500k was worth it. Ultimately, the answer is yes
because of the level of support you get and the functionality out of
the box. With no vested interested in selling these boxes I can still
answer yes - if the functionality is meeting your requirements, the
fact that you're not paying a dev team to do all this work is
valuable.

Effectively, at 50,000 documents it still works out to 33c or so per
document per annum plus power - with a hot spare. When you're talking
about open source search solutions + configuration, feeders, and
hardware + hardware support, you'll be looking at at least that
including hiring someone who actually knows what's what when things
need doing.

Hrm, maybe I should be selling these things afterall.

Steve.

On 16 August 2013 07:35, John Rock <JGren...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Got it, thank you for you answer.
>
> Dave: OK will do!
>