Before I joined the company I work for, they\u2019d bought some IBM servers and DAS storage units.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
A little while ago, one of those DAS units went offline.\u00a0 All the disks appeared offline.\u00a0 I suspected either a dead backplane, SCSI cable or controller card in the attached server.\u00a0 One of the engineers at work open a support case with IBM.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
22 days after we opened the call, we finally got an engineer on-site.\u00a0 The SCSI card had failed.\u00a0 Heck, we were even told that the IBM SCSI cards \u201csometimes lose their configuration\u201d.\u00a0 WHAT THE F**K????????\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry, but in 16 years of working with servers from Amdahl, Fujitsu and HP I\u2019ve never had that happen.\u00a0 Never<\/em>.\u00a0 The way the guy said this to me made it sound like a \u201cfait du compli\u201d.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Luckily we do keep triplicate copies of all data on independent stores so there was zero rick of data loss.<\/p>\n 22 days after we called on our \u201c4 hour on site\u201d contract an engineer finally came out to resolve the issue.\u00a0 22 days.\u00a0 22 DAYS!<\/em>\u00a0 Now that\u2019s some fantastic support from Big Blue (can you smell the sarcasm?).\u00a0 <\/p>\n It\u2019s clear to me.\u00a0 IBM sucks.\u00a0 The hardware sucks.\u00a0 Their support sucks.\u00a0 I\u2019ve called on their support twice in a year and both times they sucked.<\/p>\n I know of one company that recently had an awful experience with the IBM S series blade chassis.\u00a0 Networking didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 Someone came out to try fix it and couldn\u2019t.\u00a0 The chassis was replaced and it still didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 And IBM like to make comments about the very simple HP blade chassis backplane because it has no intelligence.\u00a0 At least it has fewer parts to break and works reliably.<\/p>\n I\u2019m amending my advice for buying IT products.\u00a0 It generally came in the form of \u201cnever buy software in yellow boxes\u201d.\u00a0 My new piece of advice: \u201cNever buy from a company that made typewriters\u201d.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been using HP for 5 years now and I\u2019ve never had an experience like the one I\u2019ve had from IBM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before I joined the company I work for, they\u2019d bought some IBM servers and DAS storage units.\u00a0 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 … Continue reading “IBM Sucks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}