IBM Sucks

Before I joined the company I work for, they’d bought some IBM servers and DAS storage units.  These were built up to host a application that is clustered to the point where we can lose 66% of the infrastructure but still be 100% operational with no loss in performance.

A little while ago, one of those DAS units went offline.  All the disks appeared offline.  I suspected either a dead backplane, SCSI cable or controller card in the attached server.  One of the engineers at work open a support case with IBM.  You see, we paid for that 4 hour on-site support contract so we expected to have that unit back online by the end of the day.  I should have learned from my previous experience with IBM last year where it took a week to get a replacement disk sent out to us.

22 days after we opened the call, we finally got an engineer on-site.  The SCSI card had failed.  Heck, we were even told that the IBM SCSI cards “sometimes lose their configuration”.  WHAT THE F**K????????  I’m sorry, but in 16 years of working with servers from Amdahl, Fujitsu and HP I’ve never had that happen.  Never.  The way the guy said this to me made it sound like a “fait du compli”.  How in the H-E-Double_Hockey_Sticks (enough swearing in this post so far) does this sound any way acceptable that a critical piece of mission critical hardware could be allowed to fail in this tolerated manner.

Luckily we do keep triplicate copies of all data on independent stores so there was zero rick of data loss.

22 days after we called on our “4 hour on site” contract an engineer finally came out to resolve the issue.  22 days.  22 DAYS!  Now that’s some fantastic support from Big Blue (can you smell the sarcasm?). 

It’s clear to me.  IBM sucks.  The hardware sucks.  Their support sucks.  I’ve called on their support twice in a year and both times they sucked.

I know of one company that recently had an awful experience with the IBM S series blade chassis.  Networking didn’t work.  Someone came out to try fix it and couldn’t.  The chassis was replaced and it still didn’t work.  And IBM like to make comments about the very simple HP blade chassis backplane because it has no intelligence.  At least it has fewer parts to break and works reliably.

I’m amending my advice for buying IT products.  It generally came in the form of “never buy software in yellow boxes”.  My new piece of advice: “Never buy from a company that made typewriters”.  I’ve been using HP for 5 years now and I’ve never had an experience like the one I’ve had from IBM.