[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...

[velociraptor]

On 2/28/06, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
> To be fair, I've also had experiences in the other direction; at a past
> job, we had an Auspex fileserver, and I must admit that every time we
> had occasion to call Auspex, we got knowledgeable, friendly, prompt,
> and *helpful* help.
>
> So I don't completely write off vendor support.  But I sure don't
> automatically assume it will deal with any problems I might have,
> either, even if the vendor assures me it will.

The best support I ever had from an IT vendor was NetApp--they
gave you the straight dope, and even at all kinds of unghodly
hours of the a.m (when you really need the straight dope).

I had occassion to interface with the Auspex folks, but they were
like the EMC guys--"this is a black box, you don't need to under-
stand it", which I dislike.

Sun support has been good and bad.  I've had good engineers
and bad ones.  One thing I have learned is *call*.  The people that
answer the cases that come in over the web are idiots pretty much
across the board IME.

I didn't experience these directly at last $ork, but I don't get the
warmfuzzies from 2nd hand discussions regarding Veritas Net-
backup Support until at least level 3; and I wouldn't deign to bother
with the commercial Tripwire folks given the answers they gave in
email to our security guys about their console causing our Oracle
cluster to crash (Tripwire + Veritas Cluster + Oracle is disaster
waiting to happen).

=Nadine=