No one wants unplanned downtime. Yet, it's an unfortunate reality for which all communications service providers (CSPs) must prepare. Consider a catastrophic natural disaster that causes widespread, inescapable damage and disruption. Amidst the destruction, network interruptions are virtually expected. While these events don’t occur every day, it’s the day-to-day downtime due to power outages, environmental factors, cyberattacks or even human error that – while unavoidable – is the most prevalent, and often the most frustrating and unforgiving, amongst end users.
Prepare for Anything
When the inevitable happens, CSPs must have the right level of support to promptly identify the issue, resolve the outage quickly and implement processes to mitigate the risk of downtime again, while keeping costs as low as possible. A key part of this is having maximum comprehensive support to enable service continuity for critical applications and end users with access to designated industry experts that monitor the network and resolve issues in designated timelines.
That’s precisely what Dell Technologies delivers with our carrier-grade support. It provides full hardware, software and solution-level support specifically for CSPs, topped off with agile and streamlined access to telecom experts to enable customers to maximize uptime and minimize downtime. It also covers end-to-end network assets for all locations from the core to near and far edge for Dell and third-party products including Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Wind River, Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat and Dell Bare Metal Orchestrator.
A key benefit of Dell’s carrier grade support is the service level agreements (SLAs) with financial risk that ensure a timely return to operation after issue detection and reporting. These penalty-backed SLAs include predefined response, restoration and resolution timelines with automated case creation and customer-facing reports to track SLA adherence and provide actionable insights on root cause. In the event of a critical incident, all Dell functional teams collaborate in real time to ensure customers are productive within the defined SLA period. With this, customers can feel confident their issue will be resolved quickly and transparently.
Dell further tailors our traditional support for CSPs with enhanced account management and reporting provided by industry-trained experts. Customers have immediate access through a single call to dedicated telecom experts including a service account manager (SAMT), technical account manager (TAMT) and customer success executive (CSET) who ensure customers obtain value in line with their goals and desired outcomes. After issue resolution, the SAMT implements recurring, scalable systems maintenance to ensure the network is consistently up to date with the latest firmware and BIOS that improve performance and availability on an ongoing basis.
Our carrier-grade support also includes proactive, predictive monitoring and enables connectivity through AI/ML capabilities that continuously oversee the environment and mitigate risk with Dell Secure Connect Gateway. Through gathered real-time connectivity information, the designated SAMT can then provide tailored intelligence and recommendations unique to each customer environment. These technologies are a foundational part of our support and enable us to continuously monitor the environment so customers can focus on network operations.