is there a SLA or contract? it's not the servers - it's the customer service that is your target. that's what you should share if that is the source of the problem.
I take it yours is not a virtualized environment? Something to consider down the road if you can make the BCA stick.
sorry this happened to you. feel your pain.
Well, a system board went out on a server that's 18 months old. I've never heard of that except in cases of heat problems, maybe a power problem if you have crap UPS. So I'm not too thrilled with the hardware either.
The contract was next-day business support from IBM. If they had shown up today like they were supposed to I wouldn't have too much a gripe. Sure - they hung up on me 3 times during the service call (maybe my phone? never had that happen before, but who knows...), 2 of the 4 techs that answered the phone were not understandable (connection problem? accents? not intelligent? not sure...), but that crap happens. Hell, I'd even overlook faulty hardware that's less than 2 years old on $4500 server model, though I'd still be reluctant to ever recommend it unless there was a heck of a price incentive (which there isn't with IBM in general)
But they left my client out to dry when warranty support was paid for over a communications issue. They didn't even order the ****ing part until noon today. I opened the ticket with them yesterday at 11 AM and called them today at 9AM to check up, and the order for the part didn't get in until noon (the tech I called at 2 PM to raise a **** storm let that slip)?!
That's just unacceptable to me. If I had known that was possible I would have started the restore
i just finished 10 minutes ago at 10 AM yesterday when I arrived on site and they would have lost 8 hours of uptime max. Instead we went for a recovery scenario that would be the least expensive for the client with minimal downtime, the problem was it banked on this server being up
today. Something I would have never thought twice about before today... I've never had a problem with next-day warranty support, not even from Dell.
I'm sure I'm the .0001% of IBM warranty service calls, but unfortunately that's all it takes. I can never recommend their products to critical infrastructure ever again. Burn me once, **** you.
As for being virtualized... they got screwed on that setup. They have 2 servers, both virtualized, but running on two physical servers. So they are virtualized, but in a meaningless way. I'm not very familiar with vmware, so I went with the export option. I had to swap the drives so I could load up their vSphere utility and run an export - the only way to get it from one to the other. So both servers were down for that, because the server has to be offline to export.
An hour into it the export was 11% done. Theses are servers with 400 GB drives (small servers) that are less than half full. I had to bail because that was going to take way too long to have both servers down. So I put the critical server up and left the other down.
Had they been two physical boxes, like they should have been, I would have installed Hyper-v on the good box, spun up a virtual and restored from backup. They would have been up rather quickly. Hyper-v's import/export is significantly faster. I exported/imported 4 servers a few months ago, all of them larger than this, and I think it was a 2 1/2 hour job start to finish.
And no, the free version doesn't allow for backups of the actual VM's. It also doesn't allow for hardware monitoring. VM ware makes great products, but they're expensive, the free version is very basic. We're going to be making changes. We inherited this literally 3 months ago.
The people before us didn't know what they were doing, I think they were accustomed to bigger environments and tried to apply things that work in bigger environments to a small business. They even made them pay individually for all the products (instead of buying one of the MS small business packages.) I talked about that before. They probably paid around 12-16k (not including labor) for something that should have cost 6. And it's not even flexible.
Grant it, the vmware export should have been a reasonable approach. I'm not sure what caused it to take so long. I could have tried grabbing the underlying files through VMWare's CLI, but with no experience doing it I wasn't sure how it would turn out trying to put two data stores on the same box. I don't think there was enough room, but again I'm a novice with vmware.
I'm seriously sick to boot so that didn't help either.
 }})
