Redundancy, disaster recovery and planning for failure - how much do you pay attention these terms in your attempts to squeeze out every ounce of cost from the project? If not much, do so at your peril.
While we ALWAYS try to analyze all possible failure points and resulting consequences with our customers we are always so very surprised when cusotmers seem to have almost no interest in doing the same (or paying for an adequate solution addressing these). Why? No idea, especially considering that it's their business we are looking out for.
Let's take menu boards for example. You would think these are pretty mission critical items, right?
When our sales guys come begging to me to remove $900 or so dollars it costs to add a second player to a dual menu-board configuration promising to close a major deal, our tech desk strongly opposes.
We don't do menus with a single player. It's just not bulletproof.
Consider what happens if one of the players or screens die, for whatever reason: dust, heat, vandalism, whatever. You have no menus!
Even the best of SLA's is not sufficient to get you back up and running in an acceptable time... How much money have you lost in the process? How much confusion would this cause with your customers? I bet it will exceed the money you saved by running an extended desktop, single license/player set-up with no failure plan.
In a dual menu set-up, we always recommend an emergency playlist that combines all essential elements of the menu on a single display. If one player/display fails, the back-up menu playlist can be urgently deployed while the issue is resolved. Total downtime is minutes, not hours or days.
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