When 4 hour parts service really means 10.

Just have a question out of curiosity. We are primarily an HP shop, and I've rarely had any issues except for a power supply here and there which are never a significant problem since all of our servers are equipped with redundant PSU's. Those replacements usually took 8-12 hours to get, but we never really complained since we were still up and running.

Today the systemboard in one of our e-mail servers fails, right at the end of my shift no less. Get a ticket opened, they verify our 4 hour parts warranty and estimate a part will be here no later than 10PM central time. Here I am at nearly 12AM central time and after trying for an hour to coordinate between HP and the various couriers involved I *should* have a part here at 4AM.

Is this fairly common, for a 4 hour parts warranty to take much longer? I'm curious if anybody has any similar issues that occur frequently as our servers are nearing the end of the warranty coverage and I'll be looking to replace them. If this is common, I don't really see the need to invest the extra money into a 4 hour guarantee that isn't ever achieved.

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sidsanders

i had 24x7x4 support on a tape library from exabyte. had to go in on a sat once for a bad tape drive, called it in and not only didnt i get any parts, they wouldnt even take my ticket till monday. exabyte lost a customer that day.

emc (cx700): opened a ticket as SPa was going nuts (SPa showed EVERYTHING was failed, SPb showed 1 bad drive). took them 12 hours to show up to begin troubleshooting it. that one took them weeks to deal with in the end... ive had a number of bad calls with emc, though that was the worst.

pre hp compaq: years ago, old proliant running netware. fan fails, server shuts down due to failure. call them to replace it, they are having probs of their own (so they said) and couldnt get us any parts. ended up splicing in a fan and velcroing it to the case to get the thing to boot. the "good ole" days of building gear out of any junk you can find cuz folks wont spend $$$...

ive had dell/stk/pre symantec veritas go over sla's to varying degrees.

fun times, isnt it... good luck with this.

leefdaddy

all of our servers are dell and we have 4 hour response... I can only think of 1 time that I did not have a part/tech onsite within 4 hours.

Dell Business support.

fleck

I used to tell all my friends in high school that we should open up a 24 hour computer shop/store (it would have been a half hour from both DC and Baltimore, too). Why didn't they listen to me. Now most of them have gotten their degrees and are pretty much no better off than I am, some only slightly better off. If only we would have just gone into business for ourselves, we could be offering better 24-hour support than these bastards.

msteinhilber

The best part of my whole ordeal doesn't really involve working from about 8AM yesterday morning until however long it takes to bring the server up after 4AM when the part is expected.

The best part was when I walked back in our server room after getting my tools and realized at the last second I didn't slide the rack rails back in. Had just enough time to react that I started to duck but caught my head near my right eye slicing it open and sending my top half backwards while my legs were still moving forward causing my head to hit the floor. That was the icing on the cake

sidsanders

ouch. is it you alone dealing with this?

msteinhilber

Nearing 12 hours, way to go HP. On the 3rd promised time now, this time from a supervisor - we'll see if they hold up to this one.

blargoe

Ouch. Sorry to hear about your struggles with this one.

We are a Dell/EMC/Cisco shop and we have had absolutely no problems. We have the 24/7/4 support from Dell and it's rare that our part isn't here within 2 hours. If we need a tech onsite, unless I request a specific time outside of the 4 hour window, it's always within 4 hours. The only time I didn't get an immediate response to an EMC failure is when the Call Home didn't work because someone screwed with the monitor on the management server.

A lot of it has to do with the third parties they use in your area that do the actual service I think. It's never actually Dell doing the work other than taking your call and putting your request in dispatch. Well in your case, HP.

SRTMCSE

We're an HP shop and I was told by my boss that 4 hour response generally means 4 hours from when the part(s) is dispatched to when it's in-transit and that's usually how it goes. Although when you talk to support they'll tell you 4 hours until you receive it. I work the night shift and have called numerous times for various parts (hard drives, fans, power supplies, backplanes, etc) and even when I call at 10PM, it usually will not arrive until 8-9ish in the morning. You'd think being in NYC it'd be more prompt, but nope.

miller811

Of course you have to look at where you live also.....msteinhilber.

Probably not a whole lot of options to get parts to a remote location in Wisconsin (no offense). BTW, I am from Wisconsin and most of it is pretty remote.

I currently live in Nashville, and we are
4 Hours from ST Louis
3 hours from Atlanta
3 hours from Memphis
3 Hours from Louisville
3 hours from Birmingham
2.5 to Knoxville
1.5 from Chattanooga

As a vendor we used to use Sonic (a division of UPS) and we strategically stocked parts nationwide. We called Sonic and they would tell us the closest location that stocked the part and they would deliver it on site. Of course a tech had to initiate the request, and meet the part on site, but the part could be picked up at the Sonic location 24/7 or delivered to site, or flown counter to counter, etc...

We now warehouse the parts ourselves and have every part for every server we support locally, and have spill over or duplication within a couple hour drive.

but, if your contract states a 4 hour response time, I would hold them accountable.

msteinhilber

We're not too remote. We're in Madison, WI which has a strong technology industry and there is Milwaukee about an hour or so away and Chicago a few hours away.

Part finally arrived a couple hours ago, DOA.

fleck

msteinhilber wrote: »

Part finally arrived a couple hours ago, DOA.

Wow. Sorry to hear that.

Therhino

hp is really bad about it...we also have the "4 hour support" which means they overnight the parts and we get them the next day

nel

i would seriously complain.

We have dell gold support and they have always been spot on.

blargoe

That is totally unacceptable. I would scream as loud as I could as far up the chain at HP as they'll let you.

msteinhilber

blargoe wrote: »

That is totally unacceptable. I would scream as loud as I could as far up the chain at HP as they'll let you.

Screaming will begin tomorrow. HP tech is here now (i've had it with dealing with this myself, their turn now). Having just about 30 hours in at the office, I'm not going to risk blowing up at the HP people due to lack of sleep.

Agent6376

... and here I was thinking I was patient. My hat goes off to you.

Hyper-Me

I wouldnt have even stayed there, heh.

We have 24x7x4 on our Equallogic SAN but luckily we havnt had to try it out yet. We carry a next day warranty on our servers (most everything is redundant anyway), and they are always exact delivery. This is dell, by the way. I dont have a lot of experience actually using support from other companies but Dell isn't bad at all.

UnixGeek

I don't have any experience with HP's 4-hour service agreements, but Dell is nearly always on time. This is primarily for the Atlanta, GA and Tampa, FL markets.

miller811

msteinhilber wrote: »

We're not too remote. We're in Madison, WI which has a strong technology industry and there is Milwaukee about an hour or so away and Chicago a few hours away.

Part finally arrived a couple hours ago, DOA.

I grew up in the Fox River Valley and also lived in Madison and Sun Prairie for several years....

I do not miss the cold, or the taxes:)

msteinhilber

miller811 wrote: »

I grew up in the Fox River Valley and also lived in Madison and Sun Prairie for several years....

I do not miss the cold, or the taxes:)

Sounds like me, grew up in Oshkosh and moved out this way. Once the housing market stables out and I hopefully recoup some of the value I lost in my home I hope to move away as well

miller811

msteinhilber wrote: »

Sounds like me, grew up in Oshkosh and moved out this way. Once the housing market stables out and I hopefully recoup some of the value I lost in my home I hope to move away as well

I grew up in Menasha.... still have family in area.

arwes

Back when we had a all in one domain controller, AD, DNS, DHCP server we had a backplane go poof on us and we lost the drives too. No idea what happened there, but we spent six hours on the phone with one crappy tech at HP. He kept having us try updating firmware on the machine and other things. Every time we would raise the point that we're supposed to have 4 hour service he kept saying he wasn't convinced it was a hardware issue. He said if we didn't allow him to troubleshoot, then he couldn't order the parts.

After exhausting all his worthless efforts, he finally authorized parts to come out to us around 3:00 PM (the initial call was around 9:00 AM). The parts made it here around 10:30 PM (I was down the road at a friend's house playing Munchkin). The parts shipped from Dallas to our tech in Shreveport, who then had to drive 100 miles or so to our office. We ended up calling it quits around 2:00 AM because we had to rebuild the array and it was taking forever. After restoring data, we were done at 8:00 PM that next night. Thankfully it happened on a Friday, so we were only down for a day. Still though, that whole experience with HP has me concerned about what we might go through with our next server outage. At least we have some redundancy now.

msteinhilber

arwes wrote: »

Back when we had a all in one domain controller, AD, DNS, DHCP server we had a backplane go poof on us and we lost the drives too. No idea what happened there, but we spent six hours on the phone with one crappy tech at HP.

That's one part I neglected to comment on. While I didn't have to wait that long, the HP tech on the phone was hinting towards a cause other than hardware - nevermind the alarm indicators blaring and illuminating on power on and the fact that the internal circuit breaker was clicking on and off constantly at about 1 second intervals. That and I mentioned that one of the larger IC's under the PCI-E riser was registering at over 300 degrees with my infrared thermometer.

tiersten

As we're primarily an IBM shop, we use IBM Global Services with a 24x7x2 service level. I've had absolutely no problems with them at all. The engineers have turned up with entire machines before so they can do part swapping. We are paying a pretty hefty sum for maintenance though but you get what you pay for.

tiersten

msteinhilber wrote: »

That and I mentioned that one of the larger IC's under the PCI-E riser was registering at over 300 degrees with my infrared thermometer.

I believe the internationally recognised method of measuring IC temperature is to start frying eggs on it.

arwes

msteinhilber wrote: »

That's one part I neglected to comment on. While I didn't have to wait that long, the HP tech on the phone was hinting towards a cause other than hardware - nevermind the alarm indicators blaring and illuminating on power on and the fact that the internal circuit breaker was clicking on and off constantly at about 1 second intervals. That and I mentioned that one of the larger IC's under the PCI-E riser was registering at over 300 degrees with my infrared thermometer.

Hah, I forgot to mention something too. I remember telling him until I was blue in the face that there were BURN MARKS ON THE STINKING (literally) POWER CONNECTOR. They've got their script, and dammit they're gonna stick to it.

Daniel333

Never had an issue with the 4 hour on site with HP. Althrough sometimes it seems like it takes more than 4 hours to get through to someone who understands instructions on the phone. What area are you in? What subcontractor did they use?

msteinhilber

Wow... what a great week!

Have a co-worker on their way down to Chicago to pickup an ASA 5510 to replace a failed PIX that just blew up on us today. Thank god CDW offers will-call pickup till 7!

Here's to another fun filled night, although this one will actually be fun to play with some new hardware

/usr

Wow...I'm surprised to hear you've had that kind of trouble with HP.

We use all HP equipment as far as servers, desktops and laptops go. I've had to replace everything from printers, power supplies, cd-roms, laptops, hard drives...you name it.

Not once have I ever had a problem like you described. Even something as small as a faulty DVD drive that arrived DOA in a workstation arrived the next day.

In all honesty, 99% of the time when we have something fail under warranty from HP, we get it the next day, whether it's a server part or not (which I believe have "priority" over the other stuff).

Sorry to hear about your frustration, but try not to get too discouraged. Sometimes those things just happen in our line of work.