[rescue] Vendor software support [was Re: RPi vs SS20 benchmarks (interesting)]

[hike]

My experience with the old Sun Microsystems was Excellent support.
Questions answered in a reasonable time frame.
Hardware was fixed as quickly as humanly possible.
The Sun servers were under Sun Hardware support.

At one job, we contracted a local Sun (approved/licensed) service provider
who was even more excellent.
Great phone support and a visit when necessary.
We have a NetApp array also.
NetApp was bon topb of any mx problem with their array.
Shipped parts to us (mainly HDDs) before the admin knew there was a problem
We also had an EMC Clairon array.
Dell used the Clairon for their Dell Arrays at this time.
So, the people who did all of the Dell array support provided the first
line of EMC array support.
(EMC wanted their own people doing certain things.)
That was a kluge.  Lots of waiting for the EMC field tech to arrive.
The Clairon had tons more problems than the NetApp.

Of course Oracle DB service sucked at both jobs that used Oracle.
Once Oracle bought Sun, they reduced the number of Sun Field/Systems
Engineers.
So the tech were the same; it just took them longer to get to us.

Service woes depend on the company providing service, IMHO.
The one director picked very well and other than existing equipment from
crappy companies, service was excellent.

My last job had pre-Windows equipment but they were willing to wait for
servicing.

On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 8:33 AM, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Having spent some time working in technical support for major software
> companies I too have a story or two...
>
> One story involved a major customer of ours that used our mainframe
> programming package to run their municipal Housing Authority. Despite clear
> large text, single sentence page warnings in the program documentation this
> gov't agency used our "development-use only" indexed database in production
> because it was so simple to use. Our warning clearly said to not use the
> DB in
> production because it can become corrupted and once corrupted it was
> impossible to correct.
>
> So when their production database went down they called for support. After
> acknowledging what the manual clearly said, they asked us if it could be
> recovered. We said no, they had to roll back to their last update they
> told us
> they stopped backing up their database daily because, and I quote, it was
> taking too long... They had to manually restore their database by going to
> a
> previous weekend backup and then reposting their previous four days of
> updates
> again.
>
> (To explain the logic of including a simple dev only database, it allowed
> programmers to quickly develop and test their applications without having
> to
> configure a DB2 or IMS database until their coding was completed, and
> cutting
> over to a full production DB like DB2 or IMS was a trivial matter
> code-wise,
> just change the file handles at the beginning of the code and go...)
>
> Lionel
>
> > On Jan 2, 2016, at 3:09 AM, Mike Meredith <very at zonky.org> wrote:
> >
> > The best story I have in relation to vendor support was way back in the
> > 1990s when I was a clueless newbie.
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