I’ve had several replies off-list, and just one reply on-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. • You can use "civilian" backup tools if you wish, such as tar, cpio, USB hard drive, etc. You can also use enterprise backup tools if you wish, such as netbackup, ndmp, etc. Unlike the proprietary OS, which requires enterprise backup tools whether you like it or not. Granted - I'll use the enterprise backup tool either way, but it's nice to have an option. > -----Original Message----- > From: Brad Knowles [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 5:13 PM > To: Edward Ned Harvey > Cc: <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Problems with netapp support? > > I've not heard of any problems with them other than with the > storevault stuff. > > At UT Austin, we have several filers, probably at least 100TB of > rotating storage connected (sadly, much of it is ancient 72F drives > that we can't get any more), and my officemate is the storage manager > for the group. I would have heard if we were having problems. > > -- > Sent from my iPhone > > On Apr 13, 2009, at 3:39 PM, Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > My VAR informed me that recently they’ve been getting complaints of > > dissatisfied netapp customers having severe problems with support, e > > ven for FAS products and not just the legacy storevault that I have. > > I am wondering if people here can substantiate or refute that? Ei > > ther because you support people who call netapp support, or because > > you personally use netapp support? > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Discuss mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > > This list provided by the League of Professional System > Administrators > > http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
