[BBLISA] RE: [lopsa-discuss] Problems with netapp support?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

I've had several replies off-list, and just one reply on-list (on a
different list.)

 

For what it's worth - the off-list responses I've had are mostly negative,
citing things like uptime-impacting diagnosis procedures, and excessively
long (several months) time to resolution for non-critical problems, and lack
of callback for a dead system.  I've been advised by two people (which
corroborates my personal experience) that you must show dedication to
managing your own case and handholding with support to keep things moving,
and if that isn't enough, you must be willing to escalate and elevate and
become the squeaky wheel.

 

One person said they don't have any problem with netapp support but hate the
sales team.

 

One person replied on-list saying there are no problems at all.

 

A couple of people have said netapp has "growing pains" in the support dept
- although personally I don't buy into it - personally I find it difficult
to believe their sales are so high and they're pulling in so much sales and
income as to be unable to find adequate support skill on the market right
now to satisfy their support needs. Just my opinion.

 

Even among the negative responses, at least a couple of people seem willing
to stick with netapp anyway.  It seems there is either real or perceived
value in their niche that isn't satisfiable by the other alternatives.  I'd
love to know - In what ways are the netapp superior to sun, to make the
netapp more attractive even if you think their sales or support is weaker?
I know that for the features I've been looking at, the sun seems more
featureful than the netapp, so I'd like to know what else there is that I'm
missing.

 

As an example of the ways sun has appeared more featureful to me thus far .

.         If you wish to snapshot one device onto another device, with ZFS,
you don't need two enterprise-quality filers plus software licenses.  You
can, if you want, send your snapshot to any system running ZFS, which could
be an additional enterprise server if you want, or you could use some old
PC, or anything in between.

.         All the software (opensolaris, zfs) is open source, so even if
something happens to the company, your platform isn't dead.  You can simply
migrate to a different set of hardware and continue as you were.

.         Because you're using a "normal" os, you can download or build
other software packages, such as monitoring software of your choice.  The
proprietary OS is unfortunately proprietary - if you want to do something
that wasn't already built-in, you're out of luck.

.          

 

 

From: discuss-bounces at lopsa.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at lopsa.org] On Behalf
Of Edward Ned Harvey
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 4:40 PM
To: discuss at lopsa.org
Subject: [lopsa-discuss] Problems with netapp support?

 

My VAR informed me that recently they've been getting complaints of
dissatisfied netapp customers having severe problems with support, even for
FAS products and not just the legacy storevault that I have.  I am wondering
if people here can substantiate or refute that?  Either because you support
people who call netapp support, or because you personally use netapp
support?

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