>Believe it or not, we don't charge for support, so a drive-out is even more painful than you imagined. We definately prefer well-known and stable to cutting edge.

We actually *do* charge for support (an annual fee rather than per incident, but it's still an income stream) and it's still painful when we have to send someone on-site. Particularly because it's usually some bone-headed thing the clients have done to themselves.

F'rinstance, we had a client who switched all their network disk storage to a Linux-based NAS and managed to hose months worth of data. (They paid extra for our time, not that there was much we could do other than cluck about backups.) Or the client who swore up and down everything was OK, but when we used WebEX to examine their server we found their 10/100 NIC was throttled at 10. (Their only comment after we fixed that: "wow, everything is faster!")

We have clients who can't keep a simple Windows network running, and we're supposed to trust them to run a SQL-Server (no matter which kind)? The prospect scares me.

Dan