Comments on: Why I Like HP

By: The Changelog

The Changelog — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 04:15:12 +0000

So, a little while ago, I wrote about why I like HP. This week, I’m starting to be annoyed at them.

My employer just bought nearly $100,000 worth of HP hardware. We get a new MSA1500cs Fibre Channel SAN (with redundant controllers, FC switches, disks

By: Sam Powers

Sam Powers — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 02:48:33 +0000

But what about the hardware? This makes me nervous, since my shop is looking at buying all dell servers. They’re pretty quick machines, and have all of the real-server-hardware stuff I’d expect, but is HP’s hardware any better than Dell’s? Really want to know.

By: The Changelog

The Changelog — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 02:19:31 +0000

Usenix is an interesting conference. Probably the best I’ve been to in years.

There are a lot of people here that maintain really, really big sites. I was at one talk where the presenter said “now this may work fine if you have 500 servers, and a bit

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 18 May 2006 22:20:53 +0000

Hehe — I have one and only one really frustrating HP support call experience. It was NFS networking HP-UX to Unicos, and after much going back and forth, and sending packet dumps on tapes etc, they finally after several weeks escalated it to the NFS team.

The NFS team immediately came back with “it is a known problem use GNU file utilities (instead of HP-UX’s) or upgrade Unicos”.

But then I think they were porting NFS from SUN code to HP-UX with each release from SUN, as they several times introduced the same regressions.

My DELL support experience aren’t great, but aren’t that bad either. I think we usually get put through to Ireland, or somewhere in Europe, rather than India, which probably helps.

Although I could do without every tool and option defaulting to being shipped as EXEs. Usually there is a Redhat version somewhere, and dig a bit deeper and you find the tar.gz sources.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Thu, 18 May 2006 16:56:52 +0000

And while we’re on the subject… the other thing that annoys me is that these Indian call centers often give fake American names to Indian employees. We all know what’s going on here, and this whole business of them pretending to be Bill or Amanda or whatever, is just silly.

It really contributes to the “dehumanizing” of the whole thing. If the company I’m talking to respects me so little as a customer that they use phony names, why should they expect me to respect them or have any loyalty?

The fact that I’m talking to somebody outside the US doesn’t bother me much (though the economic impact of all this outsourcing does somewhat).

But that they think that I am so dumb that I won’t notice what’s going on if they call their support reps by American names is just insulting.

Personally, if I do talk to somebody in an Indian call center, I’d prefer to get the person’s real name and maybe hear about *their* weather or what’s going on over there. They probably have been trained all about ours already. If I talk to somebody — regardless of where they are — let them be a real person.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Thu, 18 May 2006 16:46:02 +0000

My guess — seeing that you work with ubuntu — is that the people you know are probably higher up in support in some way.

I also believe that the small talk was something they were told to do, not something that they would naturally want to do.

In other words, I blame Dell’s policies, not the local employees that are just following them.

As for knowing they were in Calcutta specifically — I didn’t. I just picked a random example city that I’ve heard has call centers. But I am amused that I happened to pick the right one ;-)

By: Soumyadip

Soumyadip — Thu, 18 May 2006 16:27:26 +0000

Um, I know a couple of guys working with Wipro Spectramind, and handling Dell accounts here in Calcutta. I’ll pass on your complaint about the small talk to them :) By the way, I wonder how you figured out that most of the Dell call center people are down here in Calcutta ?

By: Ade

Ade — Thu, 18 May 2006 10:06:45 +0000

HP server support is very good, alas their desktop support lacks a little. We had a batch of 30 dc7600 machines that had a squeak from near the cpu whenever the system was under any load. I called the support line to report the fault for the first unit and went through removing the sata disk, cd-rom, fan on the cpu etc. But the best bit was the guy asking me to remove all the power cables from the system board , and start the PSU on its own… I asked if he was joking but no, he wanted me to try it. I laughed and asked how to turn on an ATX style PSU that has no button to press and no way a power good signal can be returned. He just asked me to try again. Finally we moved on to getting an engineer out. As a side note it was decided to check if some of the other systems still in their boxes had the same problem. My random sample of 4 all had the problem. It took 2 and a half months for HP to admit that there was a problem and got someone to replace all 30 system boards. The engineer who did the job also noted that 3 systems had faulty drives too.
But I will say that the proliant servers are great and the support for those fantastic, we’ve had speedy replacement for system boards (ILO failure), drives, PSUs, media back planes, the lot. Love ‘em. Still have problems with our MSL5052 tape library though :( pesky robot keeps jamming

By: Hrw

Hrw — Thu, 18 May 2006 09:35:52 +0000

Awesome! If every company had such support as HP…