>I would rather disagree.
>1. Zero on-site skills: from our experience even a clerical end-user can
>   sign a Fed-Ex delivery, unplug power and LAN cords from failed system, and
>   plug them back in the replacement server.
>2. Limited on-site skills: Most often available - people with limited
>   knowledge of Windows, some have done hard-disk replacement (or can easily
>   be taught how to replace hot-swap disk). With unified hardware you can
>   send only pre-built disk instead of whole server.
...

Zlatko - I think that in your experiences that you were blessed with some
         incidentally knowledgeable people at your outlying sites.
My experience with even local computer room operators is much less rosy,
which is to say disinterested, incapable, and hapless people who don't
know one connector from another.  My experience suggests that depending upon
outlying natives may just prolong a business outage, relying too much on the
happenstance skills and knowledge of one or two people who happen to work at
such a location, and whether they are at work on the day of the outage.

Certainly, many computer outages are merely inconveniences which may affect
only a small number of people at an office.  But it can, of course, scale to
full-blown site downtimes.  Businesses are free to plan for outages as
minimally as they feel they can afford, based upon perceived impacts.  I would
only encourage them to fully think through all the possibilities and
ramifications.  We've certainly seen panic postings on ADSM-L where customers
have failed to plan their backups and recovery methods to address the kind of
outage they have just encountered - which is, of course, too late.

  Richard Sims, BU