Support is one of the main sticking points, especially on-site support. Most white-box vendors have to provide this service themselves, and their response time and physical range of response are usually limited in direct proportion to the size of the clone maker. Then there's the screwdriver factor: Either many companies don't have people who can replace mainboards, or if they do, they pay them to use their time more productively. A significant amount of time can be lost replacing parts and shipping systems back to white-box manufacturers for service. Parts replacement is another issue, which we will discuss in greater detail. Of course, for most companies with many machines, having spares on hand is the best way to deliver excellent service to the end user while making support less critical.
Let's consider the three biggest myths about clones:
Myth: Clones are usually of poor quality and are plagued by incompatibility problems.
Fact: In the past, many makers of clone motherboards conducted insufficient testing and had poor quality control. This became painfully obvious in the second and third years of the life of the PC. Incompatibilities and early failure abounded, thanks to everything from floppy drives with compatibility issues to poor quality control in the manufacturing process. In recent years, however, many overseas manufacturers have rallied and are now producing quality boards. Many of them have forged OEM agreements with Tier 1 and Tier 2 vendors to produce custom-spec motherboards for use in branded vendor machines. For example, HP uses AsusTek Computer motherboards for certain rackmount products.
Another factor giving rise to reliable third-party hardware is the mess Intel made of the adoption of Rambus memory. The cost of Rambus memory was more than double that of the standard SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM) of the time, and performance gains were minimal. This, coupled with Intel's flawed VC820 motherboard, propelled manufacturers such as Via Technologies and Acer Labs into much larger roles in the chipset market. These larger roles have led to more thorough testing and better products with far fewer compatibility problems. Incompatibility problems with clones are no longer a certainty.
Myth: Clones beat branded boxes for flexibility of configuration.
Fact: Henry Ford once said consumers could buy a Ford car in any color, as long as it was black. For years IBM and the other top manufacturers lived by this creed. But times have changed, and Dell, once a notorious clone maker, has brought this flexibility to the Tier 1 market, forcing its competitors to abandon their rigid configuration policies.
And while we're on the subject:
Myth: Flexibility of configuration is a good thing.
Fact: Maybe that's true if you're shopping for a new car. But large enterprises need consistency in their desktop platforms so images can be made that will work on hundreds of PCs. The better clone manufacturers make sure that all the same components are used in machines for any given customer order, but some clone factories will switch motherboards or video cards in the middle of a production run. On the surface this doesn't sound like a huge issue, but it's a nightmare for technicians, who end up with different PCs that spec out the same and have the exact same cases. It may not even be possible to tell the units apart without powering on or whipping out your screwdriver. Sure, you can demand consistency of components from your vendor, but don't hold your breath. It rarely works.
Furthermore, even if you get identical clone boxes, you could run into problems down the road. More than likely these PCs have three-year warranties. So if one or more of the machines die in year two and aren't returned with the exact same motherboards and video cards, you're back in a leaky boat, needing a special image for one or a few machines. This is a horrible situation because the considerable effort you've expended creating, testing and storing images of machines for quick rebuild loses its efficacy when you have a few oddball units floating around in your enterprise. These issues become even more significant when it comes to pushing BIOS upgrades and other firmware upgrades onto client machines. Tier 1 vendors try hard to ensure consistency because they recognize the time savings involved in administering identical machines. And they have the resources to keep stock supplies on hand. Many white-box manufacturers do not. This can cause problems not only with parts consistency but with downtime.
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