HP SAN Support (still) SUCKS!

As I'd posted before, we had a meeting with our district Mission Critical Support manager from HP about the complete support failure we experienced during our February drive failure.

The important thing to keep in mind about this meeting is that it wasn't prompted by the "official" HP complaint we'd filed, nor some internal metrics that pointed out the failure, but because I'd bitched out the HP SAN blogger about their terrible support.

During that meeting, I took quiet a bit of abuse from the Mission Critical Support guy about how the 24x7/4 hour support contract really just means they'll have a TECH on site to diagnose within 4 hours. Seriously, I need a tech to come out to tell me the orange light on the front of the drive means it needs to be replaced? They can apparently take their time getting parts, because that area doesn't seem to have any Service Level Agreement at all.

The support manager assured me that they he had done some investigation and were ordering parts for their supply depot so they'd be available when someone in Michigan experienced a failure.

I was assured we wouldn't be getting this run-around again. He was so sure he gave me his cell number and a request to call him if anything came up.

That meeting took place 12 days ago.

Fast forward to tonight...

10:45pm, drive fails. We get a notification that it's gone toes up, so we call in a support ticket to HP. Since it's late, and I'm lazy, I ask that they deliver the drive Thursday morning rather than Wednesday night because I didn't feel like making the hour long round-trip to the office.

About 1:15am, we receive a call from HP saying they didn't have any drives within 100 miles and they'd ship us one for delivery on Friday.

You have GOT to be kidding me.

So, I call the guy. He sure sounded sleepy when he answered. :)

I explained the situation. He said he'd check into it and try to get us a drive for Thursday.

We've owned the SAN for just about 6 months now. In that time, we've experienced a 25% drive failure rate and a 0% support success rate.

How is it that I can get my drives shipped to me in 2 days, but HP can't seem to stock their own closets in 12 days?