There's a story about vendor support people like to tell: if you payenough money, a lot of money, you'll get excellent support; but if youaren't willing to pay lots of money for support, clearly it's not really that important to you.

I don't know if paying lots of money gets you excellent support; I'venever worked for an organization that was in a position to pay thatsort of money. (I think you are unlikely to get

There is a story that salesmen like to tell you: if you buy everypiece of your system from them, you'll get excellent support becausethere's only one vendor involved. One set of people who knoweverything, one place to contact, and there'll never be finger-pointback and forth about whose fault something going wrong is.

This is a myth. Let's look at the reality.

Let's say that you want some front-end servers all talking to a big