In talking with our clients, we found that most did not have staff available to meet parts delivered after hours, and were operating on next business day, regardless of the contracts specification, so our ZPA contracts provide for next business day parts to your sites.
Everything ships from Delaware, and our Techs are in Delaware and Texas. RMAs go out same day if we get confirmation to identify the correct part and shipping address by 2PM-- for drives, cables, misc parts. If the RMA is for a head unit or motherboard, we generally prefer to burn it in overnight; however, in case of dire emergency, we will also ship head units the same day.
In general, as long as you have a reasonably competent pair of hands at your site, we can talk them through replacing most components. Filers were designed for easy FRU (field replaceable unit) replacement, and that includes the common failure points – drives, power supplies, fans and interface modules.
If you absolutely need faster parts arrival, I would recommend an onsite spares kit. This is completely customizable. Drives fail the most, but if you maintain enough hot spares in the unit, then you might not need onsite spares. For shelves, there is redundancy in modules and PSUs. It’s rare that the shelf chassis itself would have an issue. As for heads, if you have a cluster, that too has built in failover and other redundant components. Are there any specific units you are concerned about? Or units that are higher priority than others? Sometimes people buy spares kits for the Tier 1 units, but not the backend, archive units. Give us a call and let us know what your concerns are and we will work with you to put together a kit that meets those requirements.